


on a stormy sea of moving emotion

by drunkonyou



Category: Marvel
Genre: Alternate Universe - Creatures & Monsters, Alternate Universe - Monster Hunters, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Hunters, Angst, Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Flashbacks, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Major Character Injury, Permanent Injury, Post-Break Up, canon disabled character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:34:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25432423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drunkonyou/pseuds/drunkonyou
Summary: It’s been five years since Clint and Bucky parted ways, torn apart by a hunt gone very wrong. Clint is sure he’s moved on, but he receives a call he never expected to get—Bucky’s been possessed by a demon, the very one he dedicated his life to hunting.A Supernatural AU
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Clint Barton
Comments: 15
Kudos: 55





	on a stormy sea of moving emotion

**Author's Note:**

> a supernatural au has been bouncing around my brain for so long and i’m SO glad i finally wrote one, y’all have no idea. but fear not! you don’t have to have seen supernatural to understand and enjoy this as it has nothing to do with the plot or characters of the show :)
> 
> once again thank you to [nightwideopen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightwideopen/profile) for being my beta and my overall cheerleader ❤️ what would i do without you
> 
> warnings for supernatural levels of blood and violence (which is just a little more than what you’d see in marvel) let me know if i need to spruce up my tags and/or warnings!
> 
> title from carry on my wayward son by kansas because of course

**2014**

He was in the apartment, packing his bag, Sam was making them dinner, and then—

Nothing. And then—

He doesn’t know where he is now. Or, he does, but—

His head is splitting. There’s blood on his knuckles.

_Hey there, Bucky boy._

He’s walking, but he’s not. It’s not him. It’s like he’s attached to marionette strings.

He tries to stop. He can’t. Oh God.

_Demon got your tongue?_

The voice sounds familiar, but he can’t place it. His head hurts too bad. He feels like he’s looking through tinted glass. He tries to rub his eyes. He can’t.

He hasn’t stopped walking.

_We’re going to have a lot of fun, you and I._

_Who are you?_

He thinks a part of him knows.

 _An old friend,_ the voice in his head says, _and I’ve been waiting for this for a long time._

  
  


The vamp’s head hits the floor just as Natasha’s phone starts to ring. Clint stares at her, breathing hard, and she stares right back. No one calls while they’re working a case unless it’s an emergency. That’s sort of an unspoken rule.

He lowers the machete, and blood drips from the blade onto his sneakers. He forgets about the phone in favor of frowning down at his shoes. “Aw, man. These are new!”

“Clint,” Natasha says in her _exasperated best friend_ voice.

He holds the machete out over the vamp’s body instead, and kicks his shoe against the dirt floor of the barn.

“Get the phone, idiot!”

“I—!” He groans. She’s got blood on her hands, he’s got blood on his hands, none of it either of theirs, and she wants him to _take her phone out of her pocket?_ “Maybe it’s soliciting.”

She rolls her eyes up to the ceiling, wipes her hands on her jeans, and takes her phone from her back pocket. She shoots daggers at him as she puts the now-bloodied phone to her ear. He hopes she doesn’t hex him again; he’s still got warts on his feet from the last time he pissed her off.

Clint busies himself with getting rid of the vamp’s body and avoiding Natasha’s gaze on his back. The son of a bitch bled a lot for someone who’s supposed to be undead (he probably just got done feeding on some sorry sack before they barged in), but the only thing he can do about that is tear apart a couple of hay bales and sprinkle it around in a half-assed attempt to cover the mess up. The body, however, he drags outside by the ankles and digs a hole for it behind the barn. When he goes back in for the head, picking it up by the hair and cringing at its fangs still unsheathed, Natasha is no longer on the phone, but instead muttering to herself. Probably some witchy prayer. She does that after hunts sometimes.

“You look like you saw a ghost,” he jokes, holding the vamp’s severed head away from him. If he gets anymore blood on him he’ll scream, and not in the good way.

Natasha turns to him, and her eyes open wide. His stomach drops. Someone _died._

“That was a nurse, at some hospital in New York.”

Someone’s _almost dead._

“Sam’s there.”

He feels his stomach drop a little further, somewhere near his toes now. _Sam Wilson._ He hasn’t heard his name—hasn’t even _thought_ about him in—fuck.

And he knows he shouldn’t think it, but wherever Sam is, Bucky’s not far behind.

“He’s okay,” Natasha manages, and his stomach crawls back up his legs slowly. If Sam’s okay, why does she look like she just took a field trip to Death’s Library?

“He’s okay,” she says again, “but she told me that Sam wanted a message passed on. She said that he’s sorry they had to call me, it’s just that Bucky is in Texarkana.”

_“Texarkana. It’s our code word for when one of us is in trouble.”_

_“Why Texarkana?”_

_“Long story. But let’s just say that after a Poltergeist case my brother is banned from any Applebee’s in the state of Texas.”_

_“Wait...Texarkana? Like—“_

_“Pretend I didn’t say anything.”_

_“I’m onto you, Barton.”_

Clint drops the vamp’s head. It thumps against the soft ground and tips over onto his left foot. 

“What?”

He heard her loud and clear, and she knows he did too, but still she repeats herself, and her voice wobbles in a way Clint doesn’t think he’s heard before.

“James has been compromised.”

A million scenerios flash through Clint’s head like a fucking View-Master, scenerios he’s thought about before, had nightmares about before, _lived through before._ Oh God. Suddenly five years feels like five minutes and he swears his ears are ringing, that painful sort of ringing he had for a month after the accident.

“Clint.”

He looks up at Natasha and shakes away the phantom ringing. Her frown deepens. 

“Did he say anything else?”

“I only spoke to the nurse. But we have to go. Now.”

They stare at each other for a few tense seconds, years of unspoken memories in the air between them, iron and soil up both of their noses, breathing harder than they were when they incapacitated the vampire. Then Natasha pockets her phone and hurries out through the rotting doors, and Clint is hot on her heels.They climb back in the Delta in their dirty clothes, not even bothering to change beforehand like they usually do. They’re getting blood on the upholstery and Natasha’s smearing it all over the steering wheel, but neither of them say a thing as they peel out onto the main road, kicking up a cloud of dust.

It’s pitch black out, and the only thing lighting their way is their single headlight, but Clint can clearly see the white of Natasha’s knuckles. He reaches over and tugs on one of her bracelets. She takes his hand, crusted with blood, caked with dirt, over the center console and doesn’t let go. They squeeze until both of their knuckles are white.

They drive like that for a few minutes—or maybe a few hours, honestly, Clint’s not sure—strung tight like violins, when a thought comes to him.

“My machete,” he says lamely, feeling like his mouth belongs to someone else, or like he’s wearing too much chapstick, or something. The only thing that’s been going through his head for the last however long since they left the dilapidated barn is _Bucky_ and _Compromised_ and _Have Nat and Sam_ _been in contact with each other this whole time?_ He’s surprised he was able to get any coherent words out at all.

“Maria Hill is in the area; she’s going to clean up the mess we left.”

He doesn’t even know when Natasha was on the phone again, but he just nods. She pulls her hand away finally and shakes out her wrist.

He has so many things to ask her, but he knows she doesn’t have a single answer. So he’s quiet, and tries not to think about what they’re heading towards.

The Delta might as well be a Delorean.

  
  


They make it to New York just after sunrise, and with the sun comes the realization that they’re both disgusting, and smell even worse. So they forgo wasting time and money getting a motel room in favor of rinsing off in a gas station bathroom and changing into a spare set of clothes from the trunk. The Delta, however, will have to wait for her own wipe down.

The hospital Natasha got the call from is in lower Manhattan, and when they find a parking space in the crowded lot, Clint finds he can’t move. He knows he has to, they have no idea what sort of trouble Bucky’s in, but it’s like every single one of his muscles have locked up at once.

Natasha comes around to the passenger side, rips open the door, and pulls him out by the collar of his shirt. She used to grab his ear like a mother would, but. Well.

“Come on. There’s no time for anxiety.”

_Tell that to my anxiety._

But he manages to make it all the way up to the floor Sam’s on without going all _Andy’s coming!,_ so that’s something. It might have something to do with Natasha holding his hand again, but he can tell her palm is just as clammy as his, so he can’t fall apart completely.

She knocks on the door, and the voice behind it that calls them in feels like coming home.

And there Sam Wilson is, five years older, just as handsome, with a butterfly bandage over his left eyebrow and a hard black cast over his right forearm. He smiles at them when they let themselves in, a little lopsidedly and not quite reaching his eyes. Bucky’s absence suddenly seems huge.

“Well, well, well.”

Natasha practically runs to Sam’s bedside and engulfs him in a hug. Clint can’t take it anymore.

“What do you mean, _compromised?”_

Natasha pulls away and glares at him. Her eyes are a little misty.

“Hello to you too,” Sam says, signing along with his words. Clint’s throat gets a little tight at the sight. Sam holds his hand out. “Long time no see.”

Clint wills his legs to work and clasps his working hand. _Home._

Sam gestures to his ears, at his hearing aids. “Didn’t notice those. They new?”

Clint scratches at his right ear self-consciously. He’d almost forgotten that the last time he saw Sam, and Bucky, he was stone-deaf. A thought barges into the forefront of his mind that he hasn’t had in a long time: he couldn’t hear Bucky’s voice the last time he saw him. Well. If this doesn’t go tits up, maybe he’ll finally get that chance.

“Had a friend make ‘em for me a couple years back. But really, Sam.”

He must really sound desperate, because Natasha puts her hand on his back, and her touch warms him to his core. Not just the regular warmth of a friend’s comforting touch, but something more. Usually he hates when she uses magic on him outside of the usual healing stuff, but right now he just can’t find it in him to care. He’s maybe even a little thankful.

Sam sighs, and he suddenly looks world-weary. His gaze goes a little distant. “I mean possessed.”

Clint’s legs turn to Jell-o, and he has to catch himself on the nightstand before he hits the floor. Natasha hurries to shut the door with a little broken gasp.

“He got a lead last night,” Sam continues. Clint shuts his eyes. He can’t stand to look at anything besides the inside of his own eyelids. “Heard about a pair of black eyes an hour away. He was going to head out this morning, so he went to pack a bag before dinner and…”

Clint opens his eyes. Sam is looking right at him. Natasha is on the other side of the bed, sitting by Sam’s feet.

“When he came outta his room...I knew something was up. I could smell it, literally. Dude smelled like day old eggs. Went for my gun, and next thing I know I’m looking up at him from the other side of the room with my arm busted up. Then he walked around the trap we had under the rug and right out the front door.”

 _Possessed._ Bucky is _possessed._ There aren’t many things in this fucked up world that Bucky Barnes is afraid of, but that… that’s one of them. That’s at the top of the list. Clint remembers, every time he caught wind of a demon nearby, the way Bucky would shake as he packed his go bag, how he would look at him before he left like he might not come back.

“Gun?” Natasha says.

“We came up with the idea a while ago. We carve little devil’s traps onto bullets. It works.”

“You were going to _shoot him?”_ Clint can’t help it, he almost shouts it.

But Sam doesn’t look surprised, nor does Natasha.

“Clint, man, you know how it is. We made that promise a long time ago.”

Natasha reaches for Clint’s hand over Sam’s legs. He lets her take it. Holding her hand feels like the only real thing in existence right now. “If one of us is compromised, we do what we have to. Right?”

Clint shuts his eyes briefly, swallowing down a ream of unkind words. She’s right. Of course she is. They both are.

It’s just… things were always different when it came to Bucky. The rules always got a little skewed.

So instead he asks, through a clenched jaw, “Did you go after him?”

Sam sighs and leans back against his pillows. The shadows beneath his eyes are as dark as the bruise blooming over his jaw, and it’s then Clint, foolishly, way too late, remembers that Sam has known Bucky longer than he has. Especially now.

“Passed out. Got myself a nice concussion. Neighbor called 911.”

Natasha tips her chin up and shuts her eyes, her own way of hanging her head in defeat. “Any leads?”

 _Any leads._ Like this is just another case and not one of their own. None of this feels real.

Sam picks up the remote from his side and points it at the shitty little TV in the corner of the ceiling. The volume goes up a couple of notches. On the screen is a local news station, and the woman speaking is reporting the opening of some new café uptown.

“The nurse took away my phone because of my concussion. Asked her how I was supposed to stay up all night without any sort of stimulus, and you know what she said? She told me PBS is pretty riveting.”

Natasha rolls her eyes, and Clint can see it written all over her face, _I’ve missed you._ He’s feeling that way too.

This is not the reunion he imagined.

“At a little after three this morning he robbed a Citi Bank a block from our place. Shot a teller and a security guard. Stole about a grand.”

Clint swallows hard and sits on the other side of Sam’s legs before he passes out and he’s thrown in one of these fucking beds too.

“I would’ve tracked him, but... No phone, no laptop, and there hasn’t been any updates from police. And my lovely nurse told me the two vics were brought to a different hospital.”

Natasha pulls her phone out, still caked with dark, dried blood. Clint takes his own into his hands and opens the Internet. “What’s his number?” she asks.

Sam recites the number and Natasha taps around on the screen while Clint checks the news. There’s only a couple articles about the robbery, all saying the same thing. White male, late twenties or early thirties, dressed in all black and wielding a rifle, opened fire in the bank, injuring two people, and stealing just over a thousand dollars in cash. In the images that were taken of him on the websites, it’s obvious the demon isn’t trying to hide Bucky’s identity. You can clearly see his blue-gray eyes, his long dark hair (longer than Clint’s ever seen it before), the fact that he’s missing an arm. And over his mouth, is a piece of duct tape.

“I keep hitting a wall,” Natasha says. “It looks like he’s either made his phone untraceable or he ditched it entirely.”

“What the fuck?” Clint says to himself.

Natasha pulls his phone towards her. “It’s so he can’t get expelled from James’s body.”

Clint swallows down the gas station breakfast that’s threatening to make a reappearance all over Sam’s lap and pockets his phone. Natasha does the same.

“Clint, you know, if you wanna sit this one out…”

Sam doesn’t even need to finish that statement, because he knows how stupid it sounds. This isn’t just another case, this is _Bucky._

Natasha, as if she could read his mind (which, despite all the times she’s assured him she’s a witch not a psychic, he’s pretty sure she can), says, “At least get some rest before we crack into this. You didn’t sleep at all last night.”

“Neither did you,” he mutters like a petulant child, looking down at his feet. His shoes still have vampire blood all over them.

“I don’t need sleep. Not much, anyway, you know that.”

“Go take a nap, Barton,” Sam tells him, voice less gentle than Natasha’s. “You look like hell, and we need you sharp for this. Bucky needs you sharp for this.”

And he’s right. He knows they’ll keep an eye on the demon’s movements the best they can and keep him posted, so what are a couple hours of sleep?

Wasted time, but. He’s too tired to object. He never got to have his post-hunt nap. And Bucky does deserve him at the top of his game, despite it all. He knows, were it the other way around, he’d still do the same for him.

So Sam tells him their address and where they keep their spare key and Clint hops in the Delta and goes.

  
  


**2003**

“Aren’t you a little young to be in here, son?”

The bartender, a tall black man with an actual eyepatch over his left eye, is looking him up and down with his good eye. There’s two other people in the bar, both of them obviously armed, and both of them with an ear turned in Clint’s direction. Everyone seems tense as hell.

“Just wondering if you got any rhubarb pie, sir.”

At the sound of the key phrase, the atmosphere lightens up, and Clint takes a seat at the bar as the other two guys relax back into their drinks. The bartender shakes his hand over the counter. His palm is large and calloused. Hunter's hands.

“The name’s Nick. What can I do for you?”

“Clint Barton. Brother’s on a hunt in town and I just needed a place to hang until he’s done. And I’ll be twenty-one in a couple months, for your info.”

Nick laughs and slides a can of Coke in his direction from a mini fridge behind the bar. Clint catches it. “Why didn’t you go with him, if you don’t mind me asking?”

Clint shrugs and takes a long sip of the soda, smacking his lips. Free always tastes better. “Got into a fight on the way down here. Figured I’ll join him on the next one.”

“Brothers,” Nick sighs through his nose, looking wistful. “I know how it is, I got two of them. I’m surprised we haven’t killed each other yet.”

With their line of work, Clint knows he’s not joking. He laughs anyway.

“Donny sure tried though,” says one of the hunters at the back of the bar, laughing drunkenly.

“Yeah, he did. Got so damn pissed on a hunt when I missed the ghoul and accidentally shot him full of rocksalt I thought he was gonna turn me into a ghost too.”

Nick snorts and takes a nondescript bottle out from beneath the bar and pours some of the clear liquid into a shot glass. The glass is placed next to the soda can.

“On the house,” he says.

Immediately Clint knows this is a test, because Nick already served him soda instead of alcohol, so he downs the glass of lukewarm holy water obligingly.

Nick takes the empty glass from him and says, “Sorry about that, some of our wards need touching up.”

“No problem. Anything else?”

Nick smiles, that sort of smile older hunters always seem to give him. Like they see themselves in him, or something. 

“Yeah, actually. Hold out your arm.”

Clint pushes up the sleeve of his shirt and lays his arm out palm up on the sticky bar top. Nick produces a glinting silver knife and cuts him just below his inner elbow. It’s a familiar hurt, and when he starts to bleed he presses a cheap brown napkin to it and bends his arm like he just got blood drawn. 

“Well?”

Nick takes away the empty shot glass and sheaths the knife in the holster on his belt. “You’re human.”

Clint raises his can of Coke. “Amen to that.”

He’s just about to take a sip when the door crashes open, and the two hunters are out of their seats and on their feet in a second. Nick has a shotgun at the ready. Clint turns on his stool, heart already pounding wildly in his chest.

The guy that’s standing in the doorway is covered in blood, almost head to toe like Carrie at the prom, and when he notices everyone’s eyes on him he bursts into tears and falls to his knees on the wooden floor.

“They’re all dead!” he wails, “They’re dead!”

Nick rounds the bar and does a visual sweep outside before shutting and locking the door. He kneels at the guy’s side on the floor, who looks around Clint’s age, but with all the blood, he can’t really be sure. Nick gestures for the other hunters to lower their weapons.

“Barnes, what happened?” He checks him over for injuries with one hand. Clint knows what that looks like; he and Barney have done it to each other more times than he can count. From where he’s sitting he can’t tell if any of the blood is coming from him though.

“Barnes, what happened?” Nick asks again, voice as hard as granite. He smooths back the guy’s short hair and pushes his head back so he’s looking up at him. “Are you being followed?”

The guy’s face screws up like a newborn baby and around all the ugly sobbing coming out of his mouth is, “No. I don’t know, Nick,” he pitches forward into Nick’s chest. “They’re fuckin’ dead, oh God.”

“Who’s dead, Barnes? Talk to me here, _who’s dead?”_

“Ma and the girls.” The words sound ripped right from his raw throat. “He killed them all and he woulda got me too but I got him in the gut with the fireplace poker. Iron,” he blubbers, like it’s an afterthought.

Clint turns his back to the scene and takes a sip of his Coke with shaking hands. He squeezes his eyes shut tight.

“Clint.”

Nick is now cradling the guy in his arms. His shotgun is on the floor next to him, forgotten. The other two hunters have gone back to their drinks like this is just a normal thing for them. Maybe it is; Clint has never trusted Indiana.

“I need you to take Barnes here to the Wilson’s place down the road. Can you do that?”

“Why me?”

A muscle stands out in Nick’s jaw. Just looking at the guy makes it kind of hard to breathe.

“Because I need to watch the bar and these two assholes are too drunk to do it for me. Can you do it?”

He climbs off the stool slowly, leaving his soda behind. He pulls his sleeve back down over the clotting cut. “Yeah. Yes, sir.”

Nick pulls the guy, Barnes, apparently, to his feet and shoves him against Clint. His nose burns with the sharp tang of blood.

“You armed?”

Clint pulls his pistol from the waistband of his jeans and switches the safety off.

“Good. It was nice meeting you, Clint. Make sure he’s taken care of.”

So he leaves the bar, feeling like he’s in some dream, one of the dreams he has sometimes after a particularly stressful hunt, where Barney comes crashing into their motel room half dead. Sometimes it’s his mom, sometimes it’s his dad. Sometimes it’s whatever they were hunting, back to get its revenge.

But now, it’s none of those things. It’s just a guy, bloodied and shaking like a leaf, clinging onto Clint’s arm like he’s his best friend and not a stranger just passing through town that happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Clint keeps his .45 held out and cocked as he walks Barnes along the road, his steps hurried, Barnes’s dragging. The guy hasn’t said anything else since they left the bar, a stark contrast to how he was not ten minutes ago. He’s quiet as a mouse now. Probably in shock.

Clint knows they’ve come across the Wilson’s place when a guy, skin almost as dark as Nick’s but half as young, comes running down the driveway of a one storey cottage and pulls Barnes into his arms. Clint is shoved out of the way and goes willingly.

 _“Sam,”_ Barnes sobs into his chest, finally breaking his silent streak. 

“Nick just called. Mom and Dad are in Harlem for the weekend helping Pops with a cursed handbag or something.”

A whole family of hunters?

Clint begins backing up, back towards the road. He knows when his job is done. But Sam catches his eye and says, “Come back to the garage with us.”

Clint wants to object; he doesn’t want to get caught up in some local drama. Plus there’ll be hell to pay if he’s not back at the motel by midnight. But then Barnes starts tugging Sam up the driveway and Clint finds himself following.

The garage is detached and small, sitting at the end of the driveway looking like a miniature version of the main house. Sam opens the narrow door on the side and they all shove their way in. A switch is flipped and three pairs of eyes cringe at the sudden light. Barnes cries out, softly.

A car hidden by a beige cover takes up half of the small space, but with the light on Clint can tell this garage isn’t just a _garage._ Warding covers the walls and windows in red paint, protective sigils and symbols he’s never even seen before. On one wall is an armory, guns and knives and even a chainsaw, and on the other is handwritten notes and crude drawings tacked to a huge cork board. There’s two standing toolboxes, and he knows one or both of them isn’t filled with screwdrivers and drill bits. One corner of the garage is bare save for a single showerhead and curtain. The floor is covered in devil’s traps. The air smells faintly of sage.

“This is sort of our bunker.” Sam has Barnes stripped down to his boxers, and the bloodied clothes are thrown into a metal trash can off to the side. Clint looks away as he undresses him further and pushes him under the showerhead. “Kind of a safe space, you know?”

The water groans on and the tattered vinyl curtain squeals against the metal rod. Clint turns back and watches the cement floor darken with both water and blood, sliding down the subtle incline and into the drain. Barnes’s silhouette is still, and his toes, beneath the gap in the curtain, are curled.

“It’s nice,” Clint says absently.

“Mom installed the shower after I left for college. She got tired of Dad tracking blood and guts into the house all the time.”

He looks up at Sam, who’s unfolding a cot now. Once it’s open and locked, he pops the lid on a plastic tote under a workbench and pulls out a pillow and an armful of blankets. He starts making the bed.

“College?” he asks him, like he never heard the word before in his life.

Sam only glances at him briefly as he moves on, crossing the garage and pulling open the bottom drawer on one of the toolboxes. He takes out a bottle of shampoo and a loofah and a fresh bar of soap. He opens the drawer above it and shuts it when he finds it empty. He carries the stuff over to the makeshift shower and sets them on the floor just outside the curtain.

“Need me to do your hair?” There’s a noncommittal noise from inside. Sam walks back over to Clint and shrugs. “Yeah. I’m home on spring break.”

“College,” he says again. Barnes reaches down and picks up the bottle of shampoo. He can just hear the snick of the cap over the hailstorm of water hitting the cement. He turns back to Sam, who’s got a white fluffy towel in his hands now. He sets it on the cot. “And you’re a hunter?”

Sam shrugs again. “Mom and Dad are both hunters and they went to college. Their dads did too. It’s not impossible. Buck, Dad forgot to leave extra clothes so I’m gonna head in the house, okay? We’ll be right back.”

Sam waves Clint out of the garage. It’s almost pitch black out and Clint’s eyes don’t even have any time to adjust before they’re heading into the house through the side door. They step into the kitchen, small and clean and bright. Through the doorway to his right Clint can see a TV tray set up in front of the couch with a plate of food and a bottle of beer on it. He can hear the television playing a game show.

Sam is already halfway down the hall and Clint jogs to catch up with him. They head into a room at the end. It must be Sam’s room; on the walls are movie posters and shelves full of trophies. There are books on the desk, knickknacks on the dresser, a cardboard box full of DVD’s on the floor next to the bed. Something tugs at Clint’s belly as he looks around the room. Homesickness, maybe. He doesn’t know, but he doesn’t want to think about it.

On the bedside table are a couple framed photos of family and friends. One is of him and Barnes, a few years younger, arms around each other. Barnes looks like a completely different person than the one showering his family’s blood off him right now. Clint glances at the garage through the window.

“Alright,” Sam shuts his dresser drawer with his hip. His arms are loaded up with clean pajamas, socks, underwear. “Ready? I don’t wanna leave him by himself for too long.”

“Yeah,” Clint says. He looks at the photo again. “Are you and Barnes—you know.”

Sam tilts his chin in a challenging way. “Why, you gotta problem with that?”

Clint almost laughs. This whole situation is laughable, in a surreal sort of way. He’ll either sleep very well or very badly tonight. “Just asking, dude.”

Sam gives him one more squinty-eyed assessment and leaves his room. “Bucky and I are just friends. Best friends. Our moms hang out sometimes.” He swallows roughly and his steps falter. “Hung out. _Shit.”_

This is way bigger than he can get involved in.

“Hey, listen,” Clint starts. He wants to tell Sam that he’s gotta get going, that his brother will ream his ass if he’s not back at their room soon, but the words die in his throat when they get back into the garage.

Barnes is sitting on the cot with the towel around his waist, elbows on his knees, head in his hands. His hair is still damp and dripping water onto his bare feet. When he looks up at them his eyes are bloodshot beyond belief, but they’re so, so bright. Clint thinks they’re blue, maybe green. Kind of gray. His skin is so smooth except for a bruise on his left cheekbone and a cut on his bottom lip. 

_You can’t be checking this guy out when his whole family was just slaughtered, sicko._

But he suddenly knows, with some unexplainable feeling at the pit of his stomach, that he can’t leave now. Because underneath all that blood is a _person,_ a person who needs help, and Clint is never one to walk away from someone who needs help.

That’s one of the many reasons he and Barney make such a crappy team.

Sam hands Barnes the pile of clothes and he hugs them to his glistening chest. “How you doing?”

Barnes’s eyes fill with tears and they spill over onto his flushed cheeks. “I don’t even know. Feels like I’m in a dream.” He looks up at Sam. “Pinch me, huh? Wanna know if this is some Djinn shit.”

Sam laughs through his nose and knocks his knuckles across Barnes’s jaw in a good-natured faux punch instead of pinching him. Then he sits down on the cot next to him and throws his arm around his shoulders. Clint lingers by the door. “You know you can’t go back there, right? Place is gonna be crawling with feds.”

Barnes nods. This life they all lead is so fucked up.

“Wanna tell me what happened?”

He audibly swallows down a sob, but he manages to answer Sam. Clint steels himself. “Our neighbor, Rodney. He showed up while we were eating dinner. Had a fuckin’ butcher’s knife.”

“Rod? Why would he do that?”

Barnes looks straight into Sam’s eyes, sober and deadly serious. His lip quivers. “He was possessed. I saw his eyes, Sam. Black as night.”

Sam leans back and searches Barnes’s face. When he finds he’s as serious as cancer, he all but collapses on top of his friend. “God, Buck.”

 _Possessed._ He can count the number of demons he and Barney have exorcised on one hand. 

He really can’t leave now. This might be bigger than he can handle but…

He steps forward, hand outstretched. “I’m Clint Barton. My brother and I are hunters.”

Barnes looks at his hand like he has no idea what it is. He doesn’t shake it, and Clint drops his arm back to his side awkwardly.

“Hey, Clint, thanks for bringing my boy here safe and sound. I’m Sam, this is Bucky.”

“Bucky?”

“Nickname,” Barnes—Bucky tells him. He looks up at Clint, with those wide blue-gray eyes, and a sort of understanding passes between them then. Clint can’t put a name to it, but you can’t stumble into a situation like this and just roll right back out. Clint can’t, at least.

He’s a part of this now.

  
  


**2014**

The apartment is cozy; two bedrooms, one bathroom stationed between them, living room, kitchenette. Clint shuts and locks the door behind him, unable to stop his eyes from flitting all over the place. Sam and Bucky have an actual _apartment,_ where they (maybe) pay rent and have consistent neighbors and get mail with a familiar name on it (well, probably not, but it’s nice to dream). They have a homebase (he doesn’t say _home_ because they all know that in their line of business home is always a people and rarely a place). They have an _address._

Clint hasn’t had a stable address since he left home at 18, tagging along with Barney thinking it sounded like a fun idea and not looking back.

_You poor, poor child._

On the one hand, he’s so damn happy for the two of them, but on the other, this apartment just proves how long it’s been. How out of touch they’ve gotten. How much they’ve changed.

So much has changed.

But then Clint, ever the nosey bastard, pushes open the door left of the bathroom and finds photos of Bucky’s late family taped to the wall by the window, his favorite albums in a milkcrate on the floor (Natasha always complained about Bucky buying a record in every town they stopped in and lugging them around everywhere. _“Buy CD’s like a sane person.”),_ that damn teddy bear a little girl gave him in Bangor when he saved her from a changeling propped up on the bed and realizes maybe not much has changed at all. He’s sure if he were to look into Sam’s room he’d find the crucefix his dad made him on the wall, the red and black gym bag he always carried his guns in, his journal with that polaroid of the four of them taped to the cover, maybe even an aloe plant on the windowsill. And in the bathroom Clint counts on there being Old Spice and Ivory soap and 1-ply dollar toilet paper.

He feels, suddenly, at home. Like when he heard Sam’s voice again for the first time in five years. He can feel the ghost of his two oldest friends in every corner of this apartment, and he breathes in deep. And, like he inhaled some of Natasha’s special incense, he feels better. Like maybe this won’t be completely awful.

Like maybe, just maybe, they’ll get Bucky back and things will be how they used to be. Before the kitsune.

(Wishful thinking.)

Clint steps further into Bucky’s room. He knows he has no right to, but it’s like some invisible force is pulling him forward, like in old cartoons when there’s a freshly baked pie sitting in someone’s kitchen window and the character will lift right off the ground and start floating towards it. That’s how Clint feels. It’s too much of a temptation to ignore.

_“I want to use the flamethrower.”_

_“Clint, don’t you dare. You’ll burn the whole place down.”_

_“C’mon, Sam! I haven’t gotten to use it yet!”_

_“The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.”_

_“See!”_

_“Buck, man, stop quoting Oscar Wilde during a hunt.”_

Clint pushes aside a box of peanut butter M&M’s and picks up Bucky’s tattered copy of _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ from the nightstand. Its cover is curling and soft at the corners, and the pages are full of pencil marks and highlighter and Bucky’s chicken scratch handwriting in the margins. Clint rubs his fingers along the edges, where the pages are stained with blood from that time in ‘07 when Natasha got a bullet in the shoulder while they were trying to make a run for it during that cult thing in Tupelo. _This is why I hate going on hunts with you morons,_ she’d yelled from the backseat of the Delta, shoving all their things to the floor. Clint smiles and stops himself from smelling the book before putting it down.

He’s about to turn away, leave Bucky’s room alone and maybe go snoop through their fridge instead, when there, hooked around the shade of a cheap lamp, is Bucky’s amulet. And, as per that invisible force that’s making him forget the concept of personal space, he lifts the necklace from the lampshade, resting the amulet in the palm of his hand. Natasha made it for Clint, carved it from some material only witches know about, a symbol of love and protection (since those go hand in hand, she’d explained with a smug smile), and he’d given it to Bucky on their one year anniversary.

Bucky only ever took it off when he slept, since that one time he woke up with this big cut on his chest and was convinced, with the blood on his sheets, that they’d somehow been attacked in the night. But he always put it back on the minute their alarm went off. So the fact that it’s here and not around Bucky’s neck reminds Clint all at once what he’s here for, what’s happened. It hits him like a freight train. He slips the necklace over his head and leaves the room.

Pressing the amulet to his chest, Clint shuts Bucky’s door behind him gently and faces the living room. He notices the faint smell of sulfur still in the air, lingering like a sick reminder. He imagines the son of a bitch riding in Bucky’s body is laughing somewhere. Along with the rotten egg smell, the couch is crooked, there’s dinner ingredients sitting out on the counter in the kitchen, the curtain on one of the windows is almost off its rod. Blood is smeared on the wall, virtually invisible to untrained eyes.

He can’t sleep in here like this, with such blatant reminders of what happened to Bucky. So he straightens the couch, puts any food away that hasn’t gone bad, fixes the curtains, wipes down the wall, and lights a match. And then he sits down.

Clint takes his shoes off and tucks them under the coffee table, which looks second hand and is holding a mug with the Ohio State University logo on it (Sam’s) and a couple of old pulps (Bucky’s). He picks up the remote and shuts the TV off, which he didn’t even realize was on when he came in, and throws his legs up onto the couch. When he leans back something digs into his ass and when he shoves his hand between the cushions he pulls out a loaded gun, a newer Colt model he hasn’t seen before. One look into the cartridge tells him this was the gun Sam was heading for when the demon attacked him. He swallows down bile and shoves it right back where he found it, deeper into the couch and unreacheable. He doesn’t want any weapons on him at all. 

For the first time since he started hunting, Clint sleeps unarmed.

  
  


Clint dreams he’s in the Delta, not long after Natasha joined their group.

Sam’s sitting next to her in the backseat, and Clint can see him giving her the side-eye from the rearview mirror. He’d look at her like that for about a month, until she saves his hide when he finds a hex bag under his pillow. Bucky’s looking out the passenger window, tapping his fingers on his knee to the Queen song that’s playing on the radio. Clint’s not listening though, so he has no idea which song it is; he’s too busy thinking about how much he wants to hold Bucky’s hand.

He’s not too sure where they are, either, or whether they’re heading to a case or from one. But the sun is out, shining into their eyes from a cloudless sky, and they’re surrounded by nothing but green, open fields, driving along a freshly paved road with no end in sight, so it doesn’t really matter. He breathes in deep, nose filling with the sweet smell of the air freshener Bucky picked up from a gas station fifty miles back and the warm, almost spicy scent that he discovered surrounds Natasha. He feels himself smile. He doesn’t know what time it is or what day of the week it is, but he doesn’t care.

The song ends. A commercial comes on.

“My turn,” Sam says from his spot behind the passenger seat. “Buck, put on—”

“I know, I know.”

Bucky hefts the box of cassette tapes into his lap and starts to sift through it.

“Cassettes?” Natasha says, a twist of wry humor in her voice. Clint thinks it’s the first thing she’s said since they got in the car. “Have you heard of CD’s?”

“Watch it, red. The tapes came with the car. They were my pops’s.”

Bucky holds up a cassette. “This one?”

Clint can smell his Old Spice deodorant when he moves his arm, overpowering the tropical air freshener hanging from the mirror.

“Yeah, pop it in.”

Clint takes his eyes away from the road in favor of watching Bucky stick the tape into the deck. His gaze drifts up to Bucky’s face, a smile already forming, a smile that says everything and nothing at all, a smile that says “Hey, I’m thankful for this moment.” He and Bucky exchange those sorts of smiles a lot lately.

But when the music starts, and Bucky tips his face up to Clint’s—

His eyes are black.

Clint swerves the car and there’s a crash but—

The crash was just the front door slamming shut, and when he opens his eyes he’s staring up at the ceiling of Sam and Bucky’s apartment and not the open road.

The dream or nightmare or whatever _(twisted memory?)_ slowly fades to the recess of his mind. The sunshine is replaced by noon light filtering through dark curtains, the familiar, homey smells turn into the lasting notes of dish detergent he used on the wall, and the front seat of the Delta is much comfier than this fucking couch.

Clint sinks a little further into the stiff cushions. The door locks.

“Clint?” _Tasha._

His entire body breathes a sigh of relief. He throws a hand over the back of the couch in greeting, then hauls himself up. Toeing off their shoes by the door, next to a pair of boots that could be no one’s but Bucky’s, are Sam and Natasha. Sam’s got his casted arm in a sling now, but the bandage from over his eyebrow is gone, the small cut on full display and making it a little hard to look at him. And the way he’s hunched over slightly is making Clint want to turn away entirely. He’s clearly wearing the clothes he went to the hospital in; there’s blood on the neckline and a tear near the bottom. Natasha guides him over to the recliner (which doesn’t match the couch at all; Clint would find that endearing under literally any other circumstances) and pulls out the footrest for him when he’s sitting down.

“Did you guys catch a cab? Or did Tash fly back on her broom?”

Natasha sets her bag on the coffee table, pushing the books and mug aside, and reaches over to swat the back of his head. He almost smiles, but the memory of Bucky’s coal black eyes makes his throat feel a little tight. He’s not looking forward to seeing that in person; he could barely ever stand to see Bucky with even a hangnail.

(He’s surprised that last hunt together didn’t kill him entirely; there was so much _blood.)_

The time on his phone tells him he was asleep for almost two hours. He feels like he didn’t sleep at all.

“Any updates?” he asks.

Natasha turns to Sam on the recliner and shakes out her hands, her bracelets jingling together. “He’s still in New York. That’s all we know.”

“What were you guys doing for two hours then?”

She looks over her shoulder at Clint. “Catching up.”

Now if Clint didn’t know with a hundred percent certainty that Natasha went for girls only, he’d think they were doing more than catching up.

He’s reminded, painfully, that the four of them were a family at one point, and Sam and Natasha had their own sort of relationship. And they were forced to pick sides because of his and Bucky’s mess of a breakup.

“Clint?” Her soft, raspy voice pulls his eyes up to hers. Her brows are drawn in that concerned sort of way she reserves for him. “Okay?”

He nods. “So what’s the next move?”

He sits up straighter on the couch, places his feet on the floor, as if that’ll ensure her that yes, he’s perfectly fine. She glances down at Bucky’s amulet hanging from his neck, then back to his face. She frowns a little, then turns back to Sam.

“Well first I’m going to heal Sam here, so keep your mouth shut,” and to Sam, “You too.”

Sam settles back in the recliner and shuts his eyes. This, too, is familiar. Clint watches silently as Natasha rubs her hands together, closes her own eyes, and hovers her palms over Sam’s head, his neck, chest, arms, all the way down to his feet. Then she goes back up the length of his body, almost touching him but not, muttering a language Clint will never understand under her breath. Then Sam sucks in a deep, relieved, content breath, and opens his eyes.

“Forgot how good that feels,” he says, his voice gravelly, like he almost fell asleep just then. Clint gets it; he thinks back to the days when they’d come back from a hunt with bumps and bruises and after a few waves of her hand, Natasha would have a room full of drowsy boys. Sam cracks what sounds like every bone in his body and slips the hospital issued white and blue sling off. “Thanks, Nat. Anyone got a knife?”

Natasha hands him her favorite pocket knife from her bra, the one that’s got an opalesque blade and a gem-encrusted handle that they all used to joke she bedazzled herself. Sam smiles briefly at it and digs the razor-sharp tip into his cast and starts working on tearing through the hard casing.

Natasha comes over and drops herself next to Clint so close she almost knocks him aside, makes a noise of discomfort, and pulls the Colt from between the cushions. She sets it on the coffee table like it’s nothing. _We do what we have to._

She squeezes his knee, her long red nails digging into his skin through his jeans. “We made some calls. All eyes are on him.” That makes a violent chill run down Clint’s spine, and Natasha must sense it because she squeezes a little harder and tells him, “They know not to hurt him unless they have to.”

Sam chucks his cast onto the floor once it’s off, a mess of cracked plaster and torn cotton, and tosses the pocketknife back to Natasha who catches it easily and stuffs it back into her bra.

Sam closes the footrest noisily with his legs and leans forward, rubbing at his arm that is now free of its papier-mâché hell. “Alright, Sabrina, do your thing.”

Natasha grins at the old nickname and gets up from the couch.

The way they’ve fallen so easily back into the old swing of things breaks Clint’s heart. He wishes Bucky were here. He wishes this reunion were under better circumstances.

He wishes that last hunt went differently.

These thoughts, as familiar as Sam’s nicknames for Natasha or Bucky’s shitty paperbacks or even the sound of the Delta’s engine, which he hears every single day, can easily drown him. But he told himself years ago that he wouldn’t let that happen.

Although that was _after_ he’d convinced himself he’d moved on, and had no plans on meeting back up with Sam and Bucky anytime soon. And yet here they are, and he can feel, with every passing second, the air getting thinner, his chest getting tighter, his head getting heavier. Either this is the fabled Second Chance, or a sick joke the universe is deciding to play on him, the masochistic fucker. 

Only time will tell, he guesses.

“Alright,” Natasha pulls him from his thoughts. She’s got her crystal ball out, freshly polished and resting on top of Sam’s OSU mug. “I’m going to try and pinpoint his location.”

A scrying spell as simple as this one, she’d explained the first time she used it in front of them, needs any reflective surface to work, which is why she was able to perform it in front of a mirror or a puddle on the ground or even the darkened screen of her phone. But this time she’s using her precious crystal ball, which she only brings out on special occasions, and it makes Clint feel simultaneously comforted and terrified. Comforted because she’s pulling out the big guns, terrified because _fuck,_ this is huge. This is awful.

This is something they shouldn’t be experiencing.

Natasha hovers her hands over the ball, dark and twinkling like the night sky,

(like Bucky’s eyes in his dream)

like she did when she was healing Sam, and says, “I need something of his.”

She looks around the small apartment but instead of picking up one of his books that are sitting right on the table she’s using, she points at the necklace around Clint’s neck. “Does he still wear that every day?”

“Only takes it off to sleep,” Sam says, and Clint’s stomach clenches.

He makes to slip the cord over his head, but Natasha stops him. “You don’t need to take it off.”

She presses the amulet into his chest with the hand that’s not held over the crystal ball, much like he did when he first put it on, and says, _“Ostende mihi illum quem quaero.”_

The crystal ball flashes like a newly lit match beneath Natasha’s palm, and when it dims it’s no longer black, but instead a glowing purple that matches her eyes. The hand pressing against his chest grows warmer and warmer until it’s almost painful, but he doesn’t dare move away.

Both he and Sam lean forward to get a closer look into the glass ball, but all they see is that bright purple and nothing else. Clint looks up at Natasha just in time to see her eyebrows draw together, and then there’s a flash and a bang and she’s being thrown in the direction of the front door as if on a wire. Clint and Sam are thrown back into their respective seats, Clint a little more violently since Natasha had her hand on him, and the crystal ball tumbles from the table and crashes to the floor.

Sam is off the recliner in an instant and at Natasha’s side, and Clint would be too, but he’s too preoccupied with trying to catch his breath, feeling like he just took a dodgeball to the gut. Bucky’s amulet has burned a hole right through his shirt and is sticking to his chest, and when he can breathe again he pulls it off like a Band-Aid.

“What the fuck?” Clint says, mostly to himself, his skin singing.

The crystal ball has rolled towards the TV stand, clear as its namesake but smoking like it should be scorched, and when Clint reaches for it, he finds it’s too hot to touch.

“Tasha.” He whirls around. Sam is helping her to her feet. Her eyes are back to their normal shade, and she seems perfectly fine. Her hair is barely even out of place. “What the hell was that?”

Sam says, “I’ve never seen that happen during a tracking spell,” and lets go of her hand when he finds she’s steady on her feet.

It takes a lot more than a tracking spell gone wrong to do Natasha Romanoff any damage.

Natasha lifts her eyebrows like she’s not surprised, like she’s seen this before, and brushes herself off. “That only happens when someone doesn’t want to be found. Someone very powerful.”

Sam drops his hand from the small of her back, and Clint lets go of his hold on the amulet so it smacks painfully against the burn it left on his skin. They both stare at her. She stares at her crystal ball on the floor across the room.

And then Sam’s phone rings.

“Wilson,” he says when he answers.

Clint catches Natasha’s eye. _Are you okay?_ he signs.

 _Yes,_ she signs back, hand stiff, jaw clenched.

“Okay, thanks. Uh-huh. Talk soon.”

Sam pockets his phone and they look at him expectantly. 

“Bruce spotted him in Jersey, around Bergen County. Followed him for about an hour, watched him cause a four car pileup for the hell of it.”

“And?” Clint asks. His heart feels like it’s going to burst right through the hole in his shirt.

Sam shakes his head, and he can feel all the air go out of his body. “He had to help with the crash, you know how Banner is. By the time he tried to pick up his trail again, he was gone.”

The three of them are quiet, the clock above the kitchen sink ticking, the crystal ball fizzling, the muted city sounds outside. The empty spot next to them seems more obvious than ever.

Surrounded by Bucky’s belongings but not Bucky.

“So,” Sam is the first one to speak again, “disaster demon?”

Natasha twists her lips up in that way she does when she’s got some disappointing news. To avoid his searching gaze, she reaches for the hole in Clint’s shirt with one painted finger, ready to heal the stinging burn, but he grabs her wrist gently.

“I wanna keep it.”

She nods and he drops her arm. She says, holding his eye, “A disaster demon isn’t strong enough to intercept a scrying spell.”

“So this isn’t your everyday black-eyed bitch,” Sam supplies like the helpful friend he is.

Natasha shakes her head silently. Clint’s knees feel a little weak.

“What do we do?” He asks, staring down at his bloodstained shoes.

“We wait for the phone to ring. We watch the news.”

That was the last thing he wanted to hear, and it definitely sounded painful for Sam to say, but he knows there’s not much they can really do right now. As much as Clint wants to hop in the Delta and go looking for Bucky, he knows that would be of no use. _Patience is a virtue,_ Bucky says in his head.

_“Is that another Oscar Wilde quote?”_

_“You’re lucky you’re good-looking.”_

So that’s what they do. Sam insists they stay at the apartment and not waste money at a chintzy motel, so he and Natasha unpack their things, setting up camp in the living room since neither of them want to sleep in Bucky’s room, and Clint sleeps in the recliner, Natasha on the sofa, and between catching a few hours of shut-eye and Sam’s home-cooked meals they answer calls from fellow hunters and watch the news.

In the course of a week Bucky travels from New Jersey to Pennsylvania to West Virginia to Ohio, leaving a path of mayhem and destruction in his wake. Every time the phone rings and another hunter tells them his location they barely hang up before one of them is getting a text telling them they lost eyes on him. And then it’s radio silence until the process is repeated. In between its stops the demon is robbing more banks, causing more car crashes, destroying government property, pulling guns on civilians. The news can barely keep up with him either.

And every time he’s wearing the same outfit and that same fucking piece of duct tape over his mouth. And every time he’s sporting a new injury. A black eye, a busted nose. He trailed blood into a Big Lots the other day and Clint nearly lost his head.

And if tracking Bucky’s possessed body all over the East Coast and into the Midwest wasn’t enough, he’s stuck in Bucky’s apartment, surrounded by all his things, constantly reminded of how he’s _not there._ How he’s just out of reach.

At this point Clint feels like the universe _is_ playing a sick joke on him, and the demon is in on it.

By the sixth day he feels like he’s losing his mind, and when his phone is the one to ring at two in the morning, he’s already on his feet by the time he answers.

“Barton.”

Natasha wakes up from her spot on the sofa with a jerk of her ginger head, and Sam opens his door, peeking out. Clint puts the phone on speaker.

 _“Morning, sunshine,”_ Tony Stark. _“Are you always awake at this hour?”_

“Where is he?”

 _“What,_ _no_ hello? _No_ how have you been? _What about_ I’ve missed you, we should go gank something together soon?”

Natasha rolls her eyes as she gathers her hair into a ponytail.

“Tony.”

_“Alright, alright. Your boy’s in Muncie. Just watched him set a house on fire. An empty one, thankfully. I’m following him around now.”_

Sam comes out and sits on the arm of the sofa, hand on Natasha’s shoulder. She reaches up and covers it with her own. They’re both looking at him, and in their bleary eyes Clint can see them waiting for the disappointment, for the telltale message sound telling them _sorry! demon got away again!_

“Don’t hurt him.”

Tony Stark laughs, tinny and far away-sounding. _“You know fuzz-bucket is my friend too, right? I mean, we only did a couple of cases together, but he saved Pep from that old Spring-heeled Jack back in the day, so that’s good enough for me_ not _to shoot him on sight. Plus I already know there’s a demon behind the wheel, thank you very—”_

Clint pinches the bridge of his nose. Sometimes _he_ wishes he could shoot Tony on sight. “Where is he now?”

There’s a pause where all three of them hold their breath. When Tony speaks again he’s quieter than usual, and sounding very business-like. Maybe Clint will save his bullets. _“He’s just… walking. Looks like he’s talking to himself.”_

They can hear sirens in the background, and Tony swears softly. Surely the first responders will scare him off, and then Tony will be telling them with a sympathetic lilt to his voice that he has no idea where he went. 

And then back to square fucking one, round and round like a carousel.

They listen to the fading sounds of the sirens, Tony’s ragged breathing as his walk turns into a jog, maybe a run. Then a noise that Clint doesn’t immediately recognize but knows is one of Tony’s inventions.

“Tony, man, what are you firing up there?” Sam leans over Natasha and says into the phone.

_“Just a stun… thing, I don’t feel like explaining.”_

“Is it a prototype?” Natasha says wryly, pulling her borrowed blanket around her shoulders and placing her pillow on top of her crossed legs.

Tony sighs into the speaker, just a little puff of air, but enough that leaves Natasha and Sam shaking their heads.

But Clint’s not. He feels like his whole body is buzzing. By now they would’ve gotten that wonderful _sorry, but_ text.

“Still got eyes on him?” He asks, anxious excitement creeping into his voice.

 _“Yeah,”_ Tony says like he can’t quite believe it himself. _“We’re almost into town now.”_

Clint swallows, and he’s speaking again before he even realizes it. “How does he look, Tony?” He asks it softly because he really doesn’t think he wants to know, and he’s not even sure the words made it out of his mouth when Tony doesn’t immediately answer.

In the weighted silence Natasha reaches out and Clint takes her hand like they’re two finalists on _American Idol_ waiting to hear who the winner is.

 _“Ah, you know,”_ Tony finally says, slightly out of breath, _“Tall, dark, and handsome. Oh, wait, no, that’s Wilson.”_

“Tony,” Sam says sternly, and Tony gets quiet again.

_“He doesn’t look too good.”_

Looks like there’s no winners this season of _Idol._ Both Clint and Natasha’s heads drop.

He swallows down the lump in his throat. “No?”

_“He—hold on. He just went into a room in a Red Roof Inn.”_

“Advance, Tony. Go in there.”

And just like that the almost somber atmosphere is broken, and he’s speaking without realizing it again, letting go of Natasha’s hand and stepping closer to the door like if Tony says the word he’ll hop in the Delta and go. He’s vaguely aware of Sam and Natasha getting off the couch too, but he puts his back to them, takes the phone off speaker, and turns off his other hearing aid, which is his way of sticking his finger in his ear.

There’s the sound of Tony running, more noises from his demon-stunner, and an explosive bang that can only be him kicking a door open.

And then… silence.

“Tony?” Clint whispers.

_“Damnit. Place is empty. He didn’t leave anything behind but that nasty smell.”_

For not the first time since this started, Clint feels like his legs might give out and he has to grab onto the nearest surface so he doesn’t end up flat on his ass.

Natasha and Sam are advancing on him now, eyes wide, brows near their hairline. They want to know what Tony’s saying, but Clint doesn’t think he can speak. The disappointment is so thick on his tongue it almost tastes like grief.

He hangs up in the middle of Tony’s apology.

“Well?” Sam almost shouts.

Clint slips his phone into the pocket of his boxers and turns his hearing aid back on. He feels like he’s breathing through a pinhole and has to swallow a handful of times before he can get any words out. “Tony lost him,” he shoves his feet into his shoes barefoot and Natasha clamps a hand on his shoulder.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“Indiana.”

 _“Indiana?_ Clint, man, it ain’t even the asscrack of dawn yet!”

Natasha digs her nails harder into his shoulder. “And Tony said he’s gone. He could be in Europe for all we know, so all we can do is what we’ve been doing.”

Shoes on and tied, Clint stands and faces them. He shakes Natasha’s hand off him and he doesn’t miss the flash of hurt that passes over her face. “I can’t just sit here anymore. I can’t do it, you guys.”

He doesn’t recognize the voice coming out of his mouth, and wonders vaguely for a split, terrifying second if he’s been possessed too.

“I can’t just—just sit back and let other hunters do our job for us. If we don’t start moving, the demon could really hurt him. Don’t you guys get that?”

Sam crosses his arms over his chest, and Clint knows he’s in deep shit now. _“Other hunters?_ Clint, these are our _friends,_ and you know I trust them with my life. They all care about Buck too, or know how much he means to us.” He runs a hand over his head, and suddenly he looks his age. He looks both world-wise and world-weary. “We can’t just drive all over God’s green earth in the hopes of catching him when he’s not staying put for long. You know this, man, so don’t go losing it on us now. Patience is a virtue.”

Clint hears it in Bucky’s voice then, and just like that every single one of his muscles, coiled tight like a snake, relaxes, leaving him winded and shaking. He hangs his head, and that’s when the two of them crowd into his space. He’s sandwiched between Natasha and Sam in a hug that’s familiar but one person short, and he holds them both as tight as he can.

Natasha runs her hand up his back and says, in a voice not unlike his mother’s, “Why don’t I try another tracking spell? Will you sleep better?”

He laughs wetly. “No. It probably won’t work again but why the hell not.”

So the three of them disband, Natasha going for her bag still on the coffee table, Clint dropping himself back into the recliner, and Sam to the kitchen to make some coffee.

None of them are getting back to sleep.

The itch to get in the Delta and drive out to wherever Tony Stark is is still there, but it’s less an itch now and more an ache, like a day old stab wound, or that burn on his chest. 

From her bag, which Clint swears she got from Mary Poppins and not a thrift shop when she was a teenager like she claims, Natasha brings out what looks like an old wooden tripod (which should _not_ have been able to fit in that bag) and a detailed map of the States, the kind with towns and even street names. She clears off the table, setting everything carefully on the floor, and lays out the map. Then she unfolds the tripod-thing and places it deadcenter, each of its three legs almost reaching the edge of the map. On top of the tripod is a clear glass dome, and hanging from the center is a crystal fastened on the end of a long piece of copper wire.

“It’s a bit outdated and definitely used more by humans than witches but,” she shrugs, stepping around the table so she’s facing the rest of the apartment, “it works.”

“Well, we’ll see,” offers Sam, handing mugs of steaming coffee to them and settling back into the couch with his own. “How does this work?”

Clint and Natasha both take a sip of their coffee, and catch each other’s eye. He knows exactly what she’s thinking. _Just the way I like it._

Taking another quick sip she touches the fingertips of her free hand to the glass dome and closes her eyes. All three of them take a deep breath. She recites a string of Latin that Clint doesn’t recognize, and when he looks over at Sam he finds he looks just as lost.

The crystal starts to swing back and forth like a pendulum, slow at first, then faster and faster until it’s spinning over the map in a wild circle, and Clint is sure the thing is just going to snap and fly across the room.

And then it does.

But instead of hitting the wall it hits Natasha square in the solar plexus, and he doesn’t know how such a small piece of rock could knock her over, but it does, sending her onto her back on the floor with a startled shout. Her coffee is the thing that goes flying, soaking the map in its flight across the room and shattering against the wall behind the TV. Clint makes to get up, but he finds he can’t, and when he looks over at Sam he sees he’s having the same sort of problem. They’re both stuck in their seats like they’re strapped down, and they can barely even move enough to jostle their own mugs of coffee clenched in their hands. Then Natasha starts to scream.

“Natasha!” Clint yells. His hearing aids crackle in his ears, and he doesn’t know if it’s from all the screaming or whatever powerful force is doing this. “Tasha!”

Sam is straining against his invisible restraints so hard every vein is standing out in his forehead and Clint thinks he’s going to fucking hurt himself if he keeps that up.

Natasha is screaming herself hoarse, kicking at the coffee table, bracelets and rings scraping against the hardwood floor. And then there’s a sound that could be nothing but the crystal dropping to the floor, and her screaming tapers off into pained crying. The tripod bursts into sudden flames, eating up the map and turning it into a pile of ash, and Clint and Sam stare at the miniature bonfire before them breathing hard enough to power a windmill.

And then just like that whatever was holding them down lets go, and they both spill their coffees in their haste to get up. Like a match dropped into a toilet bowl, the tripod fizzles and goes out, leaving a thick stream of black smoke curling up to the ceiling.

Once on their feet, they see Natasha.

She’s lying on her back, her pajama shirt torn open and exposing her midriff. And on her stomach, carved with the crystal that’s now lying, bloody, beside her, are the words _COME AND GET ME._

Blood trails from the wounds, down her sides, pooling into the hollow of her belly button, soaking into the waistband of her sweatpants, and her quick, gasping sobs are only making the words bleed more.

Clint drops to his knees beside her and Sam does the same, staring at the little yellow crystal and knocking it away. Natasha’s blood is warm and slick and stains the hem of his boxers, his shoes, his hands when he touches her hips as gently as he can.

“What the fuck?” Sam has both hands on his head. “What the _fuck,_ Nat, what the fuck.”

Natasha lets out another heaving sob. Her face is as red as a tomato, but her jaw is set and her brows are furrowed, and Clint would be terrified of that look if she weren’t bleeding all over Sam’s living room floor.

When she speaks she sounds like she swallowed a handful of glass, and her voice shakes. “What does it say.”

They’re both silent.

_“What does it say?!”_

Clint and Sam lock eyes over her and Sam tells her, faintly, like he might just pass out right here, _“‘Come and get me.’”_

Natasha honest-to-God growls, braces her shaking, sweaty hands on Clint and Sam’s thighs, and hauls herself up into a sitting position. The groan she lets out is animalistic, a pure, unadulterated noise of pain, one they’re all too familiar with, but haven’t heard it from her before. More blood trails down the front of her pants, turning the gray cotton black.

Clint stares at the ghastly sight of her shredded stomach, feeling sick enough to puke into her lap. “I’m so sorry. Holy fuck, Tash, I am so fucking sorry.”

She looks at him, sweaty red hair sticking to her neck and temples, and her nostrils flare. “Don’t, Clint.”

He shuts up.

“This wasn’t your fault,” Sam tells him, one hand on Natasha’s back, the other on her knee. “Nat, what can we do?”

She laughs humorlessly. “Get out the bleach. Clint, we’re going to the bathroom.”

The two of them help her to her feet with a fair amount more of moaning and groaning, and then Sam lets go and Clint walks her, painstakingly, to the bathroom. He shuts the door behind them with his heel, no doubt getting blood on the wood. Without warning Natasha jerks out of Clint’s careful hold and starts to strip her clothes off until she’s standing there completely naked, her pajamas a bloody heap on the tiled floor at their feet. The only part of herself she tries to hide with her hands is her stomach, covering the jagged, oozing words like she’s trying to keep her guts from falling out. 

“Can you start the shower?” she asks him, sounding like a little girl and not a full grown woman, an all powerful witch.

This is when it finally hits him just how strong this demon really is. It broke _Natasha_ down, turned her into someone she doesn’t let anyone see.

Bucky is in so much fucking trouble.

But he can’t think about that right now, as much as he wants to, as much as he knows he has to. Sam’s right. There are a million eyes on Bucky. They’re doing as much as they possibly can, and right now Natasha is the one who needs him.

He squeezes past her and reaches into the shower to turn the water on, and when it’s warm enough he holds her hand as she steps under the spray. She leans against the wall, eyes closed, and just lets the water run over her naked body. Clint pulls the curtain shut, leaving enough of a gap to stick his head through. He watches the blood run down her in rivulets, swirling around her feet and down the drain.

“What can I do?” he asks when the water finally runs clear. His eyes drift to her stomach again, and the skin is red, infected. If she doesn’t heal herself soon they’re going to have another problem on their hands.

Natasha pushes off the wall and soaks her head. Her hair, darker now that it’s wet, makes her look as pale as a ghost.

“Just stand there and admire me.”

An unexpected laugh bubbles up past Clint’s lips. “Want me to wash your hair?”

Were this eight years ago Clint would never ask such a question, would never even be in the bathroom while Natasha showered, but they’ve been through too much together, witnessed too much, to care anymore. In the grand scheme of things, and with the lives they lead, there’s no room for shame.

Natasha hands him a bottle of shampoo and he pops his hearing aids out just in case and sets them on the sink, throwing him into some much-needed silence, then squeezes a generous amount of the Old Spice into his cupped palm. He hands the bottle back to her silently. Natasha puts her back to him, pushing her hair back so it trails halfway down her spine.

He washes her hair slowly, methodically, fingers massaging her skull, and he prods at her shoulder when he’s finished. When she turns back to face him she signs, _Thank you,_ and shuts the curtain in his face so it whips against his nose. He laughs again, quietly he hopes, and sits down on the closed toilet lid.

His world might be completely silent for now, but he sees the purple light on the ceiling and can feel the heat coming from behind the curtain that he knows is more than just steam from the water, and he smiles.

  
  


**2005**

Sam’s driving, which means he’s got his dad’s shitty tapes on, so Clint is spending the whole way to Sioux Falls talking to Bucky. Texting is a pain in the ass, he’d much rather talk to him and drown out the music, but last time he did that Sam threw his cell phone out the window and Bucky nearly had himself a heart attack when they didn’t check in. That was the hunt Sam forgot his own cell phone back at the motel, so they were well and truly fucked until they found a payphone at a gas station. So he’s stuck giving himself carpal tunnel for the time being.

He doesn’t think he minds, though. Carpal tunnel, a bullet, he’d probably take it all for Bucky.

(He would never tell Sam that. Or Bucky for that matter.)

“Feet off the dash or you’re walking.”

Staring at Sam’s profile defiantly, fingers never pausing on the keypad of his cell phone (he’s gotten really good at texting blind lately), Clint toes his shoes off, letting them hit the floor with an obnoxious thud, and stretches his socked feet even further up the dash until his toes are pushing against the cool glass of the windshield. And just to dig a little deeper, he reclines his seat back noisily.

Sam laughs and shakes his head, and turns his music up until the bass nearly deafens Clint.

 _sam is being an a$$hole_ he sends Bucky.

Bucky texts back: _dont kill him ;-)_

_no promises_

“You two talking about how much you love me?” Sam shouts over the pounding music.

Clint reaches out with a foot and turns the volume down. He wiggles his finger in his ear. “How’d you know?”

Sam shrugs. “Hunter’s intuition. Got it from my momma.”

_ill help u burn the body_

Clint laughs out loud as he reads the message.

Sam is quiet for a moment, then says, “When are you gonna tell him?”

Clint looks at him again and finds no smirk twisting his mouth, no twinkling in his eyes. He throws his head back against the seat and sinks down impossibly lower.

“Tell him what.”

He knows what. And he’s known for a while now.

“About your big fat crush on him. Buck doesn’t like secrets, you know.”

He waves Sam off, turning as far towards the passenger door as his seatbelt will allow. “Yeah, yeah, I know. But there’s no secret.”

“So he knows?”

Clint snaps his cell phone shut. “Can we just focus on the case, please?”

Now it’s Sam’s turn to laugh. He slaps the steering wheel and turns the music back up a few notches. “Wife found her husband on the bathroom floor on Monday with a mouthful of razor blades. We’re gonna scout the house for hex bags. Come on, talk to me. We still got like twenty minutes until we reach the city. Have you and Buck talked about it yet?”

Clint shuts his eyes and tries to calculate the amount of broken bones he’ll suffer if he throws himself out of the car right now.

The music shuts off.

“Clint.” Aw man, Sam’s using his Dad Voice. He’s really in for it now. “I’m serious.”

He throws his hands up. “It isn’t a big deal! Relationships are kinda pointless for us, aren’t they?”

“My parents have been married for almost thirty years, bro.”

 _Yeah, but look at what happened to Bucky’s family,_ he wants to say, but just thinking it makes him feel bad.

So all he says is, “Yeah, well, that’s _your_ family.”

But Sam seems to understand. He reaches over to pat his knee and drops the subject entirely.

Small miracles.

Twenty or so minutes later they’re in Sioux Falls, parking on the side of the road outside of the house Bucky gave them the address to. They straighten their ADT uniforms out, making themselves a bit more presentable, a bit more believable, and climb out of the Delta.

The wife answers the door in a full face of makeup and a sundress, and Clint’s first thought is that _she_ planted the hex bag, if there is one. Because no one looks this good after their spouse is brutally murdered in their own home.

“Hello, ma’am,” Sam reaches out to shake her hand. “We’re with the alarm company. Mind if we come in?”

She smiles like she was waiting for them and steps aside. “Of course, boys! Make yourselves at home.”

They step inside and she closes the door behind them.

“Would you like something to drink? Lemonade maybe?”

“No, thank you,” Clint answers for both of them. First rule of hunting: never accept beverages from sketchy people. He learned his lesson after that Shifter case in Toledo a couple years back. He had the shits for a _week._

Sam gives him a look, and Clint rubs at the corner of his eye with his pinky, their way of saying _something’s fishy, keep your eyes peeled,_ and understanding passes over his schooled face.

They follow the woman into the living room, where she sits on the clean white couch and smiles up at them like she didn’t find her husband’s dead body in their ensuite a couple days ago. 

“Do what you need to do,” she tells them, tucking her blonde hair behind her ears, “I’ll be here watching my soaps. Danny always hated soap operas.”

Her voice doesn’t even waver when she speaks of her late husband. 

“Thank you, ma’am,” Sam tells her with a business-like nod to his head, dialling up the politeness just in case. “We’ll be quick.”

They head back into the foyer first, tinkering with the alarm panel on the wall next to the front door aimlessly until they think the woman is engrossed enough with her soaps for them to sneak up the stairs.

There aren’t any photos on the walls, Clint notices. Just generic pieces of artwork that look like they were bought at Big Lots. The master bedroom sits at the end of the long hall, and there aren’t any photos in there either. Usually there’d be a wedding photo or two on the dresser or the nightstands, but there’s nothing. And when he thinks about it, he doesn’t think there were any downstairs either. The bedroom is sparse and tidy, and the ensuite is just as clean.

“It’s like the guy didn’t even exist,” he comments, and Sam hums.

“If the wife is the one who planted the bag, wouldn’t she have gotten rid of it by now?” he asks, opening up the medicine cabinet over the sink.

Clint lifts the lid off the back of the toilet gently so he doesn’t make any noise. He’s right; she would’ve gotten rid of any evidence before she called 911. But— _aha!_ He pulls a little cloth bag from inside the tank and holds it up. “Maybe not. Would you like to do the honors?”

Sam takes his zippo from his pocket and flicks it open. He holds the flame to the corner of the bag and when it catches Clint drops it into the little porcelain garbage can next to the toilet, thankfully empty of anything else that may be flammable. The cold porcelain smothers the embers almost instantly. Sam replaces the Zippo with his gun and Clint takes out his own.

“Must be new to the game.” He checks the cartridge and slams it back.

“Must be,” Sam does the same. They both cock the guns. “Let’s go ask the missus a few questions.”

They creep back downstairs, .45s loaded with witch-killing bullets (Sam’s dad came up with them a while ago and Clint could kiss him on the mouth for it) and held down low. The wife, Stella Marlowe, is where they left her, sitting on the couch in front of the TV looking like a woman straight out of a magazine. But her gaze is a little distant, staring at the wall over the TV and wringing her hands nervously in her lap.

Gotcha.

“Mrs. Marlowe,” Sam announces when they reach the bottom of the stairs. “Tell me, did you love your husband?”

She looks startled at the question, even more startled at the guns, and she stops wringing her hands in favor of hugging herself. When she speaks, the happy-go-lucky woman who offered them lemonade is gone. “What? What’s going on?”

“Did you kill him?” Clint asks bluntly.

She bursts into sudden tears, and they point their guns at her. Her fingers dig into the white flesh of her arms. 

“No!” She cries. “David was a bastard, and I admit I have thought about—about it before, but it wasn’t me. I don’t know what happened.” Her face contorts into a pained little smile, her chest hitching. “It was like I had an angel watching over me.”

Their arms drop a little bit, and they exchange dubious glances.

_The hell?_

Just then something catches Clint’s eye through the window behind Stella Marlowe when he looks back at her. There—standing next to the Delta parked across the street and looking up at the house, is a woman.

He sets his jaw. “I think I see your angel now.”

He makes a break for the front door, not even waiting to see if Sam is following. Though he hears him spouting apologies at the woman, and a second later he’s back at his side.

The woman is still standing by the Delta, and as they get closer Clint sees she’s not really a woman at all—well, she _is,_ but she looks like she’s their age. And she’s grinning. 

“That our witch, you think?” Sam murmurs, aiming his gun at her. She’s dressed in a sleek black leather jacket with pants to match, and the heels on her feet are almost the same shade as her curly red hair, her shirt too.

“Has to be. Hey!”

The girl—the witch, doesn’t even look at them, but Clint knows by the roll of her eyes that she heard them just fine. 

“Hunters, I’m assuming,” she drawls in a bored sort of way, and leans her hip against the trunk of the Delta, where all their ammo is.

“Step away from the car,” Sam orders, gun back in position pointed right at her pretty head.

Finally looking at them straight on, the witch pushes off the Delta and takes a step towards them, heals clicking against the pavement. They take a step back.

They haven’t dealt with many witches, but they know what they’re capable of.

“How many people have you killed?” Clint asks her, pointing his gun a little lower so it’s aimed at her stomach.

She grins, big and white. “I don’t kill people. I kill men.”

Sam’s mouth works like he doesn’t know what to say. Well.

And then the witch grows serious, angry, almost, and her hands drop to her sides. “You didn’t pull your guns on that poor woman, did you?”

“We thought she killed her husband,” Clint says, and realizes just how pathetic he sounds saying it.

She rolls her eyes again like they’re insufferable. “And why did you think that.”

Sam looks at Clint, unsure. The few witches they’ve met, none of them were this cocky, this unbothered staring down the barrel of a gun they know they can smell the witches brew inside. “She wasn’t upset over his death. That was a red flag.”

“Can’t a woman just be happy her husband’s dead?”

They have no idea what game she’s playing.

She cocks a hip and crosses her arms again. “Didn’t you see the bruises?”

“Bruises?”

She laughs, and it startles them back another step. “Useless. All of you. David Marlowe beat his wife. She came to me for help. That’s what I do.”

Their guns go down. Clint feels like shoving the thing up his own ass and pulling the trigger. He’s so _stupid._

“Now you get it. Are we done here?”

Sam levels his gun at her again again, but Clint doesn’t. “Why’d you leave your hex bag? Wanted us to find you?”

The witch, seemingly okay with being questioned by two hunters armed to kill, tells him in her bored tone, like she’d rather be doing literally anything else right now, “She doesn’t know I’m a witch. I planted it when they were both at work, and I planned to retrieve it before the funeral, but I just didn’t get a chance. I was a little more brutal this time around, if you must know. So I had to be more cautious than usual. Plus she hasn’t left the house.”

Sam lets this sink in. Then when he’s satisfied with her answer, asks, “Who else have you killed?”

The witch seems to have to think about this for a second, twisting up her full lips in thought. It makes her cheekbones more prominent, and Clint realizes there’s a cat-like quality to her. That makes sense, considering she’s a witch and all.

“The guy in Lawrence who catfished teenagers, the dad in Salt Lake City who sent his daughter the the ER twice a month, that teacher in Milwaukee who had a folder of kiddie porn on his computer—”

“Okay—”

“The guy in Little Rock who threw a kitten out of a moving car—shall I go on?”

“No, no,” Clint says, stomach doing funny things. They shouldn’t have stopped at Taco Bell on their way here. “Thanks, we get it.”

The cogs are really turning now though. There’s something about this girl—

Sam cocks his gun and Clint shoves his arm down. “Man, what’re you _doing?”_ Hand still holding his arm, Clint looks at the girl. “Do you get paid for what you do?”

She sniffs. “Yes.”

“And you only go after assholes.”

“Guys that deserve it, yes,” her eyes narrow, her lips twist. “Why, you know someone?”

He laughs, and Sam looks at him like he just grew another head. He lets go of his arm, and surprisingly Sam keeps his gun down. “No, no. But…”

He looks to Sam, who seems to get it immediately. “Oh no, no way. She’s a _witch.”_

“I’m aware,” Clint says steadily. “But she’s not like others.”

“That’s a dangerous sentiment,” the witch offers, but says nothing more. The twinkle in her green eyes tells Clint she finds this amusing.

“The witch is right!” Sam waves at her without looking her way. “There’s no way we could trust her, man. What’s gotten into you?”

He shrugs. He has no idea, but something in him is telling him this is a good idea, that they could use her. Something.

Sam throws his head back, pinching the bridge of his nose with his free hand. “This has to be Bucky’s fault. It has to be! No one’s got a heart bigger than that shitbrain.”

Clint laughs, and the witch hums in what sounds like her own sort of laugh.

But Sam isn’t laughing, and he whirls on Clint so fast he wouldn’t be surprised if the gravel tore a hole in the sole of his boots. “But this ain’t a stray cat, Clint. It’s a witch.”

“Uh, excuse me?” Said witch raises her hand. Her pile of bracelets slide down her wrist and into the sleeve of her jacket. “What would make you think I’d want to join your little boyband anyway?”

Sam gestures at her, eyes bugging out of his head, like she just gave him the perfect answer. But Clint persists. 

“Are you a part of a coven?”

She lifts her sharp chin a little. “No.”

“So you’re wayward, like us.”

She looks like she wants to protest, but instead just nods silently. Clint smiles at Sam, who looks like he wants to put a bullet in his brain. 

But then, as if by some divine force, all the fight goes out of Sam’s body. He sighs. “Fine. But if she turns on us I’m shooting her point blank.”

“Sam!”

But she just laughs. “Didn’t your mommy ever tell you that’s no way to make friends?”

Sam scowls at her. She raises a challenging eyebrow at him.

“So?” Clint says, hope filling his chest like a balloon. “You kill bad guys, we kill bad guys, it’s a match made in heaven!”

She looks at him, smirk on her painted lips, like he’s something amusing. “You’re like a golden retriever.”

“So I’ve been told,” he holds out a hand. “What do you say? Let’s be wayward together.”

She looks at his hand, and then takes it. The instant their skin touches a chill ripples down Clint’s spine, and he knows it wasn’t magic. It’s something stronger. Something clicking into place.

“Natasha Romanoff.”

“Clinton Francis Barton. You can call me Clint.”

“You can call me Natasha.”

“Alright, Tasha.”

He pulls his hand back and looks to Sam.

“Sam Wilson,” he says, wholly unenthusiastic.

Natasha lifts her eyebrows in greeting. “I hope I don’t regret this,” she says.

_Me too._

  
  


On their drive back to the motel where Bucky is waiting for them, Natasha tells them she’s a former student witch from Russia _(“Russia? You don’t have an accent though.” “Very good observation, Barton.”),_ who learned witchcraft from the woman who adopted her after her parents died when she was young. The woman who taught her was a natural witch, born with her powers, and was kicked out of her coven for being _too kind-hearted._

Clint elbowed Sam when they heard this.

After she died a few years ago, Natasha took everything she learned and moved to America, staying under the radar of the abundance of hunters she found lived here. Until now, of course.

Clint’s thankful, though. Seeing her sitting in the backseat of the Delta with her beaded bag on her lap (which she conjured up out of nowhere), looking out the window as she tells them her life story, it just feels _right._

Despite her unforgiving demeanor, she’s proved to them she’s not at all bad. She kills humans, sure, but humans that more than deserve it. Monsters, you could say. They’re not much different at all.

Bucky is engrossed in his research when they get back to the motel. He’s got his laptop open and three different stolen library books spread out across the table.

“Hey,” he says absently, “Might have to run out tonight; there’s a guy in Harrisburg that’s convinced his landlord is a demon—”

He looks up, notices Natasha standing behind Clint and Sam, and is on his feet pointing a knife at her in an instant.

“Stand down, soldier,” Sam tells him, and heads to the kitchenette for a post-hunt beer. “We just picked up a stray.”

Bucky looks to Clint and puts his knife away. “Huh?”

Natasha shoulders past Clint and holds her hand out for Bucky to take, painted fingers pointed down like she’s the queen of England. “Natasha. Witch. New member of your losers’s club.”

Sam snorts from the kitchenette. He sounds like he’s digging into their leftovers from breakfast. “Okay, Beverly.”

Bucky’s mouth drops open a little, and he cocks his head in Clint’s direction. Clint only smiles at him and shrugs in a loose, dopey way. If anyone understands why he decided to ask Natasha to tag along, it’s Bucky Barnes. And after a second of searching Clint’s face, he does. He snaps his mouth shut and shakes her hand.

“Bucky.”

Natasha snatches her hand back, and for a split second Clint thinks Bucky’s iron ring he always wears on his left hand burned her, but she just says, “I am _not_ calling you that.”

Bucky screws his face up. “It’s my name.”

“No it’s not. I know a nickname when I hear one.”

Bucky shakes his head a little and says, “James Buchanan Barnes. Pick your poison.”

“Good to meet you, James,” Natasha steps further into the room and stares at the two beds. “Three boys and only two beds? Wonder who’s bunking together.”

Sam snorts again from where he’s leaning up against the sink and eating from a styrofoam container. Natasha, smirking, looks between Clint and Bucky.

“I’m using your shower and then I’m going with James to Harrisburg so I can pay Alfred Mueller a visit. One of his employees called me last night and told me he likes to get a little too touchy-feely with the girls in the office.”

And then she disappears into the bathroom and Sam laughs, mouth full.

“I take it back! I like her.”

Clint catches Bucky’s eye and they both blush.

He wonders vaguely what he’s just gotten them into.

  
  


**2014**

Clint shakes himself out of his reverie when the shower curtain slides back open. The grizzly words are gone from Natasha’s stomach, leaving in their wake a patch of raw, shiny skin, like she tore her flesh off and got herself some new skin. If he hasn’t known her for fucking ever he probably would’ve believed it.

A pair of fingers snap in front of his face and he looks up.

 _Towel,_ she signs, and he pulls the manila-colored towel from the rod on the wall and hands it to her. The rest of her skin is sickly pale, despite how hot he knows she had the water, and he feels like he could cry. Which definitely isn’t often, but since Sam called last week he feels like he’s been on the verge of tears. He looks away.

Natasha steps out of the tub carefully, soaking the mat, with the towel wrapped around her, wet hand on his shoulder to steady herself. She snaps again to get his attention and signs, _Bashful?_

He smiles and after a moment signs, _I’m sorry._

She rolls her eyes and slaps his cheek none too gently. _Not your fault, asshole. Demon’s fault._

The sign for demon makes him shiver, two hooked fingers at the top of her head like horns, and Natasha leans down to kiss his hair. She smells like Old Spice and Ivory Soap and home. While she’s there, though, she freezes, going completely rigid on top of him. He opens his eyes, getting an eyeful right down her towel, and slaps her hip to get her attention. She unfreezes and reaches for the pocket on his boxers.

Clint gets the memo and takes his phone—which he always forgets to keep on vibrate—out to see Tony’s name on the screen. He clicks Accept and puts the phone to his ear.

Natasha hands him his hearing aids from where they sat on the sink and he slips them on with an embarrassed smile. It’s been five years and sometimes he still forgets.

“Hello? H—hello?” he says when the hearing aids boot up and start doing their job.

 _“Barton. Your boy just drove a car through a high school in Shelbyville.”_ Tony again.

“Shelbyville?” His voice sounds too loud for the small bathroom. Natasha shakes her head like a dog, sprinkling more water on him, but then her hair is perfectly dry. _Witches._ “He’s still in Indiana?”

_“Looks like. I called everyone in the area in case he beams out of my line of sight again. Right now he’s trying to outrun the cops, and he’s winning.”_

“Keep us posted, Tony, we’re on our way.”

He hangs up the phone and stands. Before he can barge out of the bathroom like a madman Natasha grabs him by the arms and looks him in the eye. Despite her sallow cheeks and the bruises beneath her eyes, she smiles.

“We’re going to get him back.”

He smiles back at her, small and quivering and feeling very, very foreign. Suddenly his throat gets tight, and all he can do is nod. 

Sam is in the kitchen making breakfast sandwiches when Clint steps out of the bathroom, shivering as the cooler air of the apartment hits him. The place smells fucking fantastic, and Clint’s stomach grumbles despite the bundle of nerves there. Natasha follows, barefoot and in her towel, leaving the pile of bloody clothes behind her, and heads straight for her bag. The living room looks as if nothing ever happened; the floor is shining and free of bodily fluids, and Bucky’s books and the TV remote are back in their place on the coffee table. The mug, Clint can only assume, has been washed and put away. He has no idea where the little tripod or crystal went. He hopes in the trash.

“Tony just called back,” Clint announces, phone still in his hand and in very real danger of being crushed to bits. “He’s still in Indiana.”

Sam freezes with his hands full of freshly cooked bacon slices. “You’re kidding.”

Natasha, unabashed as ever, unwraps herself, throwing the towel onto the couch, and begins pulling clothes from her Mary Poppins bag. Sam swears softly and leans over the counter to make sure the curtains are still shut. They are, though he has no idea who might be peeking in at this time. The clock over the kitchen sink tells him it’s barely three a.m. “We’re going to head out there, and we’re going to be cautious. It’s looking forward to us, after all,” she says.

As Natasha dresses, her movements stiff, Clint works on getting his shoes on. “We’ll arm ourselves to the teeth.” Usually if this was your everyday disaster demon, they just like a show, but it’s not.

“Clint, pants,” Natasha says, hooking her bra together from the back.

Clint looks down. “Aw, pants.”

She tosses him a pair of jeans from the depths of her bag, an old pair that flares a little below the knee and has holes in the thighs. They’re definitely his but God, she probably had them in there since 2006, at least. He tugs them on over his sneakers. At least they still fit.

Sam goes back to making his sandwiches. He looks constipated.

Shoes on, palms sweaty, phone now tucked into a bejeweled pocket at his ass, Clint says, “What’s wrong with you?”

Sam sighs. “I just—this is leaving a bad taste in my mouth.”

“Ketchup gone sour?” Natasha quips. She’s fully dressed now in a black tank top and a pair of pants that look way too uncomfortable to hunt in (though Clint knows better) and slings her bag over her shoulder. The atmosphere has lightened considerably, but Sam is still frowning.

The sandwiches now finished, he wraps the three of them in pieces of hand towel and tosses two to Clint and Natasha. “You said it yourself, Nat. He’s waiting for us. This is a trap and I think it’s going to be one hell of one. I just don’t want any of us to get hurt, you know? He’s put us through hell as it is, and that’s not even counting Buck.”

His voice cracks over Bucky’s name and, mouth full of fried egg and ketchup, Clint throws his arms around him. He hugs Sam long and hard, eating his sandwich over his shoulder. Sam doesn’t seem to mind, just hugs him back and tries to contain himself. His chest hitches against Clint’s own a couple times. Eventually he pulls away, and his eyes are wet, but he’s smiling. He brushes crumbs from his shirt.

“You’re the worst. I love you, man. Love you, too, red.”

Natasha lifts her sandwich. “You too, Sammy.”

Clint takes a deep breath, willing his own sudden tears down. He thinks for the first time since they got Sam’s call, Clint feels almost hopeful. Trap or not.

“Let’s go exorcise that bastard.”

The demon might be waiting for them, but he’s definitely not ready for them.

  
  


An eleven-hour drive would usually be driving Clint batshit, but having Sam in the car with them feels like the good old days, and by sunrise he’s almost able to convince himself that it really is five years earlier and they’re on their way to a hunt and Bucky’s just back at the motel keeping tabs on them. The guy in the chair, he’d call himself, since he rarely participated in the hunts. He had all the knowledge though, which was just as good.

They stop at their favorite fast food places, piss at gas stations, switch drivers every couple of hours on the side of the road, and pretend like they’re not heading towards their biggest nightmare.

At around noon, Sam, who’s been driving for the last fifty miles and bopping along to his shit music that’s playing from his phone (Clint refused to look at a cassette tape in the year 2014, and he’s sure Natasha would’ve killed him if he dug out that godforsaken box), he says, “You kept her in good shape, man. I knew I could trust you.”

Clint looks at him warily. “What’d I do.”

Sam laughs, and it makes the crinkles at the corners of his eyes more prominent. He reaches over and pats Clint’s thigh. “I’m being serious! I asked you to take care of the Delta and you did. She’s still purring like a cat, look at that.”

Clint smiles as he watches Sam pet the steering wheel.

Yeah, this could easily be five years ago. So long as he doesn’t look at the wrinkles at Sam’s eyes or the way Natasha is rubbing at her stomach like she just ate a big meal because he knows the spot where her crystal did its damage still bothers her or think about how Bucky isn’t on the other end of his phone.

He looks at the time on the dash; there’s still a couple hours until they reach Shelbyville. He reclines his seat and shuts his eyes against the glare of the afternoon sun.

  
  


**2006**

Clint jerks himself awake. He stares at the dark ceiling of his and Bucky’s room, sweat pooling in every crevice of his body and heart stuttering in his chest. He doesn’t remember the nightmare, he rarely ever does, but it still left him with a sour stomach. He looks over and finds the spot next to him empty, and when he flops his slightly trembling hand against the sheets he finds them cold. Huh.

Clint pushes back the blankets and swings his legs over the side of the bed until his bare feet touch the fucking freezing floor. He yawns, sneezes, rubs his eyes until fireworks flash behind the lids, and stands. He cracks his knees twice, his back once, and yawns again. One peek out the window tells him it’s still pitch black outside.

When they checked into this old townhouse late last night, the first thing Clint noticed was not the huge wooden banisters or the crazy old wallpaper, the things Sam appreciates in a building, but the bar. It was across from the check-in desk, and when he and Bucky stuck their heads in, bags bumping against their legs, they laughed like kids because the bar was _loaded._ And none of them had had a decent drink in months.

Bucky promised Clint they’d check the bar out after they kill the Tulpa that’s been terrorizing this poor Maine town, but it looks like the son of a bitch forgot to practice what he preached.

Tugging on his socks, a sleepy smile pulling at the corners of his mouth, he readies himself to sneak up on Bucky downstairs when he notices something written on the stationary pad on the nightstand. He shoves the pen aside and squints at Bucky’s chicken scratch.

Written beneath the stamp of the townhouse’s name and date established (1897) is this:

_Clinton,_

_couldn’t sleep, you know why_

_saw on news teen nearby convinced classmate is possessed by devil & no one believes him but I do _

_if not back by 5am come guns blazing_

_don’t worry—will leave tulpa for us :)_

_B_

The address for the kid is written in the postscript.

Clint looks at the alarm clock next to the notepad and frowns at the red, flashing numbers that clearly tell him it’s nearing 5:30. His stomach drops so fast it leaves his knees shaking.

Anger propels him forward, out of their room and into the brightly lit hallway. He squints against the wall sconces, his socked feet pounding against the carpeted hallway. He feels like his blood is boiling. They _never_ check out a lead without making sure at least _one_ other person is conscious, and they _definitely_ don’t leave notes.

Clint reaches Natasha and Sam’s room and bangs his fist on the door, not giving a fuck if he wakes everybody on their floor. The door swings open in his rapid fire knocking and he almost breaks Sam’s nose. Sam dodges his flying fist and pulls Clint into the room by the front of his shirt.

”Man, what the hell?” he whisper-yells. The door is shut and locked behind him and Sam flicks on the lights. He’s got a gun in his hand. “I could’ve shot you!”

“Bucky’s gone,” he says flatly, jaw clenched so tightly his temples ache. He brandishes the note he snatched off the nightstand and waves it in Sam’s face. He’s vaguely aware through the red in his vision Natasha sitting up in the king sized bed.

Sam grabs the paper from him and scans his eyes over Bucky’s message. His shoulders sink, and he rubs his wrist on the hand he’s holding the gun over his forehead. “Goddamnit.”

“He never does this, Sam.”

It’s true; out of everyone, Bucky’s the most stringent when it comes to their job, and understandably so. He doesn’t go on many hunts with them, preferring to usually stay behind with their research and notes, but he always has his guard up, his eyes peeled. He adheres to the rules they’ve put in place over the years and is the first to remind them if they fuck up. Even when he gets wind of a demon and heads out to take care of it on his own, he does everything right. He always has his head on straight, no matter how hard it might be for him. Always except when—

“What day is it?” He asks suddenly, a sick feeling crawling up his dry throat.

Sam understands, and he seems to sag even further.

“April 29th,” Natasha offers from her spot on the bed.

“Goddamnit,” Sam says again, turning away.

April 29th. It’s the anniversary of Bucky’s family’s death. _Fuck._ He thinks back to the letter, how he started it off with _couldn’t sleep_ and the anger simmers down, replaced with a heavier sort of feeling that turns his boiling blood to sludge.

This is the hardest day of the year for him, harder than the anniversary of his father’s death by a longshot since he was so young when his dad got killed, so how could Clint forget? He’s supposed to make sure Bucky doesn’t do anything stupid! One long drive and some nice big beds and the promise of alcohol and suddenly he’s forgetting everything.

If they’d checked out the bar last night he wouldn’t have fallen asleep.

“Fuck,” he says lamely. “I should’ve kept a better eye on him. I can’t believe I forgot.”

“Now’s not the time for blaming,” Sam tells him, throwing his gun into Natasha’s lap and working on getting dressed. “Let’s just go get the sonofabitch. Do you know how long he’s been gone?”

Natasha sets the heavy gun on the nightstand and crawls out of the bed. She’s in a shirt that looks vaguely like Bucky’s that’s big enough to cover the tops of her thighs and her hair looks nothing short of a rat’s nest on top of her head. “I peeked in on you guys around two. He was in bed reading. Clint was drooling.”

Sam throws a set of clothes at Clint and he catches them before they fall to the floor. “What were you doing up at that hour?”

She flicks her hair out of her face as she pulls on a pair of basketball shorts from inside her magic purse, which look suspiciously like Sam’s. Has she been robbing them? “Getting laid.”

Sam and Clint lock eyes, brows raised, and look at her in unison.

She freezes. “What? The girl at the front desk was hot.”

When they’re all dressed and Clint is wearing a pair of Sam’s boots, just a size too big, they lock both of their rooms, taking only the necessities, and cram into the elevator.

The lobby is awash in early morning lights, all pinks and golds shining off the tiled floor and fancy antique statues, and Clint can just imagine what they look like, waltzing through this beautiful building in their ratty clothes and sleep-mussed hair, grimy and blood-stained bags over their shoulders.

Natasha breaks off for the front desk and leans over the counter, Bucky’s shirt slipping off one shoulder. The girl behind the counter, the same one that checked them in last night, looks up at her with sleepy eyes and a bright blush breaks out on her face.

“Morning, gorgeous,” Natasha says. “Were you here all night?”

The blush deepens. Sam groans and turns away. 

“Not all night,” the girl says.

Natasha hums. “You didn’t happen to see our other friend pass through here a couple hours ago, did you?”

“Oh yeah, he was leaving when I got back—” her eyes widen, and Clint thinks if her face gets any redder steam is going to start coming out of her ears. “When my break was over.”

“What time was that?”

“Around 3:30, I think.”

Natasha pushes off from the counter and winks at the poor girl. “Thanks, sweetheart. We’ll be back later.”

 _That’s optimistic,_ Clint thinks, and shakes his head.

“Alright, boys. Let’s go find James.”

The Delta, thankfully, is still parked where they left it. So maybe Bucky’s not completely out of his mind. They stuff their belongings in the trunk and clammer in, Sam behind the wheel, Clint in the passenger seat, Natasha spread out across the back seats. The address Bucky gave them is only ten minutes from the townhouse.

“How’d we get that lucky,” Sam muses, pulling out of the parking lot. “There’s a demon right down the block on Buck’s worst day. It’s like waving a steak in front of a dog.”

“Is it always this bad?” Natasha asks. Clint can see her in his side view mirror wrangling her hair out of its bun and into a neater ponytail.

He forgets sometimes she hasn’t been with them from the start, and therefore never celebrated the 29th with them.

“At the start, yeah,” he tells her. The anger is completely gone now. Now he’s buzzing with a sort of nervous energy. He thinks back to when they first met, after the explosive fight with Barney where he broke the news that he was staying in Indiana, when Sam went back to college and Clint stayed with Bucky at the Wilson’s place. Those few months were some of the strangest of his life.

Clint spent a lot of time with Sam’s parents, learning from them, hunting with them, enjoying the company of a loving mother and father who understand the business and staying under one roof for more than a few days. It was so _normal._

But then there was Bucky, who never hunted anything before in his life. He filled his time with research, learning anything and everything he could not only about the supernatural, which he already had a vague knowledge of from his dad, but about demons. He spent his days at the library and locked himself in Sam’s bedroom at night with borrowed books and handwritten notes Mr. Wilson salvaged from the Barnes’s house not long after the massacre. Hours upon hours were spent poring over that shit, and therefore Clint didn’t see much of him in those first few months of their friendship, but he could _feel_ the heartbreak; grief followed him around like a stormcloud.

He didn’t see much of Bucky, but somehow that start to their friendship was a defining moment. It solidified their relationship. Experiencing that sort of grief from someone else is the perfect icebreaker.

It went on like that until Sam graduated, and then when he returned home from Ohio the three of them decided to hit the road on a more-or-less permanent roadtrip, taking Mr. Wilson’s 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale as a parting gift. They came up with the idea in an unspoken sort of way, like they were all thinking the same thing. It just seemed right. It felt written, or something. To this day Clint still can’t explain it, just like how he can’t explain why he wanted Natasha to tag along with them. 

And when they left, Bucky was different. He was… better. Clint was afraid he was suppressing things (he knows exactly what that looks like), but he came to realize he’d simply moved on. He went through the roller coaster that is grief and came out the other side ready to get shit done. He came out swinging.

Sam knew Bucky wasn’t a hunter, that that was his dad’s gig, so he put him on research duty, made him their guy in the chair, and Bucky was more than happy with that.

Sam didn’t ask about their time while he was finishing up school, probably knowing better, so they never told. It’s weird to think about how, to this day, Sam’s mom and dad aside, Clint is the only one who knows just what Bucky went through after his family’s death. He thinks maybe that’s why they’re as close as they are now, why their relationship always differed from their separate relationships with Sam.

(Well, there’s more to it than that, but he’s not ready to unpack it just yet)

The first time Bucky went after a demon was around a week after they left the Wilson’s. Clint and Sam were napping after spending the morning digging up some bastard’s bones that was haunting a middle school bathroom. Clint was the first to wake up, and he remembers coming to and finding a figure standing in the open doorway of their motel room. Half asleep, he couldn’t tell it was Bucky at first, just saw the bloody clothes and let out a yell that startled Sam awake from his own bed.

Sam wasn’t fully conscious either, and had the gun he kept hidden under his pillow out the second Clint opened his mouth. He ended up firing blindly at the thing in the doorway, and it was only when it went down with a pained shout did they realize it was Bucky.

It wasn’t bad, Sam just grazed his upper arm (thank God he was barely awake because Sam Wilson is not a shit shot), but that’s when they decided to lay down some ground rules. And when Bucky revealed all that research he’d been doing was so he can find the demon that killed his family.

They were both more than fine with that, they even offered to teach him some of their own skills, having been hunting for so long themselves, but they told him if he was going to be going on hunts by himself, he had to let at least one of them know.

Everything was fine and dandy after that, they helped Bucky cope healthily, and no one got accidentally shot again. The only times Bucky lost his head was the anniversary of their death. That first year he came with them on a hunt and went batshit crazy on a vampire nest (while they were supervising, of course), and then they had a _Star Wars_ marathon back in their room. The second year was a little better, Clint managed to keep him in all day while Sam took care of some shifter a couple miles away.

He tells Natasha the gist of it, and he sees her nodding through the mirror.

They reach the house in almost exactly ten minutes. The residential street is quiet, and there are two cars sitting in the driveway. Either Bucky isn’t here or they’re about to walk into something really bad. Clint is good at preparing himself for every scenario, but whenever Bucky is involved it’s like all rational thinking flies right out the window. He feels like no matter what they walk into it’s probably going to make him do something stupid.

Oh, yeah. He’s definitely gonna have to address this thing soon. As much as he’d literally rather die.

After parking the Delta on the road they pop the trunk and shove all their shit to the back so they can lift the false bottom, revealing their armory. They each grab a plastic gun full of holy water since, Bucky has taught them, demons can’t be harmed like any other monster, and they should try not to injure the person they’re possessing. 

“Where the hell is the duct tape—the rope?” Sam asks, sifting through their mess, shoving guns and sheathed knives and boxes of bullets aside. “Man, we really gotta organize this shit. My pops would have my neck if he saw this.”

Natasha snorts where she’s leaning against the side of the car.

Clint rubs his sweaty palms on his pant legs and goes to cock the gun he’s holding before he realizes it’s fake. He glances nervously at the house, hoping to see a curtain move or a light go on, but there’s nothing. “Bucky probably rooted through it before he left. We should go, you know.”

Sam sighs, shutting the false bottom and then the trunk lid. “There’s no salt and a can of spray paint is missing so you’re right. Come on.”

Sam leads the way, with Natasha silently taking up the rear. She keeps shaking her hands out like she’s got a cramp in her wrists, but Clint decides not to ask.

They find the door unlocked, and Sam looks back at the two of them before pushing in. They step over a line of salt, and the smell of sulphur hits them so hard Clint’s eyes water. They pause and listen. The house seems completely silent, not even a television can be heard, and they advance, their footsteps careful.

Natasha waves her hands like a boardwalk gypsy and Clint swears he feels heat coming off them. When he glances back at her he finds her eyes glowing a bright purple. _Witches, man._ “Basement,” is all she says.

Sam catches his eye and nods. The door to the basement is halfway down the hall, just across from the bathroom, and the door is propped open no more than an inch. Light floods the stairwell and the room below. That stale egg smell wafts up the stairs.

Sam opens it with a careful finger and steps down onto the first step, holding his water gun out like it’s real. In this situation it’s probably just as lethal. Clint and Natasha follow behind, quiet as a couple of church mice. With every step closer they get to reaching the bottom of the stairs the harder Clint’s heart seems to pound in his chest.

And then Sam freezes on the last step, every muscle going completely rigid, and it stops beating entirely.

“Nice of you to finally join us,” says an unfamiliar voice, a young voice, but it sounds strained.

Clint scrambles down the rest of the stairs and shoves himself next to Sam. Natasha is a bit more graceful when she peaks between them. The first thing Clint sees is Bucky (his eyes always seem to find him first), held up a couple inches off the floor against the painted cement wall next to a television set by an invisible force. He’s breathing, but he’s beat to hell and barely conscious, and if whatever is holding him lets go he’s gonna hit the floor like a sack of potatoes.

“Bucky!”

“Clint, no!”

He’s heading towards Bucky before his brain can catch up with him, but the moment his hands are on Bucky’s bleeding, bruised face he’s being wrenched back like someone grabbed the scruff of his neck. He hits the corner of a bed he hadn’t noticed in the darkened corner and goes sprawling. It takes him a second to regain his bearings, and when he opens his eyes there are two middle aged faces staring down at him from the bed. A man and a woman, both with bloody noses and tear tracks staining their cheeks and a piece of duct tape over their mouths.

He grabs a fistful of sheets and hauls himself up. His lower back hurts like hell. Sam is still at the bottom of the stairs, plastic gun full of holy water pointed at the demon, who’s tied to a support pole in the middle of the room by rope, a piece around his shoulders, his hips, his ankles, and a piece tied around his hands. He can’t be more than sixteen or seventeen, but the black eyes and the sick grin he’s giving them gives way to the thing taking his meatsuit for a joyride.

“I knew he wasn’t a lone wolf!” The demon cackles, a noise that doesn’t match his body. “I love hunters. You guys are _fascinating._ Except this one. He asked too many fuckin’ questions.”

Clint, hand pressed to the base of his spine like an old man, rounds the bed, leaving the kid’s parents whimpering and shaking like a pair of puppies. He then notices the devil’s trap spray painted in black around the support pole, and frowns.

The demon notices. “I learned how to use my powers while stuck in one of these things. Ain’t that something? Your friend was halfway through a very thorough exorcism when I took him by surprise.”

Clint raises his gun and shoots a stream of holy water right at the son of a bitch’s face. He screams bloody murder, and the skin where the water hit bubbles and smokes like they’re throwing acid on him. Sam follows suit, and the two of them drench the demon until he’s hollering so loud Clint’s sure the neighbors can hear.

Natasha runs over to Bucky just as the demon lets go of him, and she catches him without even touching him, lowering him gently to the cement floor with her own, gentler telekinesis. They stop squirting the demon with holy water and the smell of burning flesh is so cloying they have to hold their shirts over their mouths and noses.

While the demon is growling and sputtering, Natasha waves her hands over Bucky’s way too still body, but she’s shaking her head.

“What, Nat?” Sam asks, more forceful than Clint thinks he’s ever heard him. “Is he okay?”

She slaps her palms down on the floor. “I haven’t mastered healing yet. Fuck. He’s gonna need a hospital, I can’t help him.”

Clint, well, he wasn’t even expecting her to be able to heal him, so he’s not surprised, nor disappointed. 

Sam seems to be thinking the same thing, but he’s still pissed, so he grabs a canister of salt from the floor and drops his gun in its place. He rounds on the demon, who’s no longer screaming and whose skin is no longer a sick, bubbling mess, and grabs his jaw. He wrenches his mouth open and pours the salt down his throat.

“Sam, he’s just a kid!” Clint shouts, but the second Sam pulls back, the demon is spitting a bloody glob of salt into his face like the world’s nastiest loogie and starts cackling.

“Brother, I’m a hundred years old!”

There’s a familiar groan. All eyes go to Bucky, who’s stirring in Natasha’s lap. 

“Buck?” Clint throws his gun onto the bed, startling the teenagers parents sitting there, their hands and feet tied together with what looks like shoelaces, and jogs to Bucky.

“My book,” is all Bucky says when Clint drops to his knees at his side.

“Clint,” Sam, who’s back to pointing his water gun at the demon, nods his head in the direction of Bucky’s upended duffel bag on the other side of the room. Among the mess is a miniature moleskin, one Clint has seen Bucky writing in numerous times, and he dives for it.

“Gimme,” Bucky says, so Clint does.

Breathing harshly through his busted nose, spraying the white floor with red, Bucky sits up and starts flipping through the pages. Jesus Christ on a cracker with cheese and olives, he looks bad. Not only is his nose broken, but his bottom lip is split at the corner, trailing drying blood down his chin, his left eye is nearly swollen shut, and there’s a wicked bruise blooming at his temple. Pain is written on every inch of his face, but his eyes are open and aware and Clint couldn’t be more relieved.

“Where was I,” he says to himself, like he lost his place in Harry Potter and not his creepy little demon journal. Then his fingers stop, and he holds the book open against the floor with his spread palm.

_“Vade, santana, inventor et magister omnis fallaciae, hostis humanae salutis—”_

The demon roars, bashing his head back against the metal pole. At once, the four of them go flying, each hitting a section of wall with a pained shout, Bucky’s louder than all. But by some stroke of luck or magic he’s still holding his notebook, and he cranes his neck to look down at the pages.

Either Bucky’s been hiding some superhero strength or the demon is weakening.

_“Humiliare sub potente manu Dei: contremisce et effuge—”_

Another deafening roar, but Bucky keeps going, voice strained. The words sound like they’re being ripped from his throat.

 _“Invocato a nobis sancto et terribili nomine_...oh God.”

Bucky howls as loud as the demon, and he looks like he’s trying to curl in on himself against the wall, feet scrambling against the painted bricks.

“Let him go!” Sam screams. “You son of a bitch, you’re killing him!”

Clint pounds his fists against the wall, but it’s to no use, he can’t move at all. Natasha, on the other hand, is able to move her hands, and flicks her wrist in the direction of the demon. His head is wrenched to the side like someone just socked him one. When the initial shock is gone, he smiles at her, teeth bloody.

“A witch. What are you doing hanging with a bunch of humans, sweetheart?”

“They’re decent,” Natasha growls. “Unlike some people,” and flicks her wrist again. This time the demon is almost torn entirety from his place against the pole.

“Buck!” Clint shouts. “Buck, come on, you can do it.”

Bucky catches his eye and nods. When he opens his mouth to continue, his teeth are bloody too. _“Quem inferi tremunt,”_ he takes a deep breath and spits blood to the floor. He’s starting to lose his strength again, Clint can tell by the way the book is sinking lower and lower, but still he reads on, and he doesn’t think he’s admired somebody so much in his life.

_“Ab insidiis diaboli, libera nos, Dooomine.”_

“Fuck you! Fuck all of y’all! I hate hunters!”

_“Ut Ecclesiam tuam secura tibi facias libertate servire, te rogamus, audi nos!”_

With one last drawn out scream, the demon’s head is thrown back against the pole with a sharp _clang_ and out from his mouth floods a cloud of thick black smoke, billowing upwards in a shooting stream until it disperses against the ceiling. The teenager droops against the pole, and one by one the four of them are dropped to the floor, one painful thud after another.

And then—silence. Clint wonders if anyone else in the room can hear his heart thudding in his chest.

“Billy?” Comes a wavering voice from the bed, and when Clint looks he finds the parents got their pieces of duct tape off their mouths.

“My God, is he okay?” The dad asks.

Sam gets off the floor with a groan and limps over to the bed. Natasha heads for the boy.

But Clint—he can’t move.

Because Bucky is still where he’s slumped against the wall, chin to his chest, one leg underneath him at an odd angle. Clint, not trusting his legs to hold him, crawls across the freezing cement floor, salt digging into the skin of his palms and crunching against his dragging feet.

“Bucky?”

He puts his hand in Bucky’s short hair, feeling his sweaty scalp beneath his fingers, and pushes his head back gently. His eyes are shut, his face slack. Blood has dried thick and crusted beneath his nose and in the cleft of his chin. Clint’s nostrils flare against the tears that threaten to spill. His hand slides down his burning face and rests at the side of Bucky’s neck. His pulse is weak but it’s definitely there. He grips his shoulders with two strong hands.

“Bucky, please, please open your eyes.”

He’s vaguely aware of Sam carrying the teenager upstairs, followed by his parents, of Natasha standing over them, but all his focus is on Bucky.

_Oh God he’s not waking up. Why isn’t he waking up?!_

He has fought every monster imaginable, has killed the thing that goes bump in the night more times than he can count and come face to face with the Boogeyman himself. He knows what fear feels like; he’s been afraid since the moment he left home at eighteen to follow Barney around the country like a lost puppy.

But this… this is different. This is a fear he’s never felt before, and it’s all-consuming, choking, making him feel foggy and cold.

And then the smooth plane of Bucky’s face contorts, lines appearing beside his eyes and wrinkles in his nose and the relief that clambers down Clint’s spine is so immense he thinks he blacks out for a second.

Natasha lets out a wet sigh and turns away from them. She starts to clean up their mess, throwing rope and half empty canisters of table salt into Bucky’s duffle bag.

“Buck?” Clint whispers.

Bucky swallows and opens his eyes. The whites are covered in spiderwebs of red and he looks like he could drop back off at any second but Clint just grabs him by the face and kisses him. He doesn’t realize what he’s doing until he’s pulling back, and Bucky’s pained, half-conscious eyes are growing wide, the red smear of his mouth forming an O of surprise.

“Huh,” is all he says, and laughter bubbles up Clint’s chest but he tamps is down.

“Don’t you fucking do that to me ever again.” His voice cracks as he says it, and his hands jostle Bucky’s head for emphasis.

Bucky starts to cry, his pallid cheeks growing ruddy, his nose turning the color of the blood that’s staining the both of them, and falls forward against Clint’s chest. Clint pulls him in like he’s a kid, holds him tight enough to hurt, and begins to cry himself.

“You’re so fucking stupid.”

“I just wanted to find the demon,” he says weakly into the side of Clint’s neck.

“I know,” Clint holds him a little tighter like if he doesn’t he might float away. “I know you want to find it, Buck. But I’m gonna be right there next to you when you do, okay?”

Bucky wipes his nose on the collar of his shirt and nods. Natasha is crying quietly to herself as she straightens up this stranger’s basement that was destroyed by their demon-possessed teenager.

“We’re a team. We’re a family. We’re in this together.”

Bucky looks up at him then, and some of the pain has left his eyes. “Together.”

For a split second Clint wonders if he’s going to regret this, that he was just terrified and was saying anything, but he knows that’s not the truth.

He’s known it for a while now. He just wished it didn’t take something like this for him to say it. And the thing is, he’s barely even said anything, but that look in Bucky’s bruised eyes tells Clint he knows, just like that.

God, he’s an idiot.

So he kisses him again. “Together.”

  
  


**2014**

When Clint wakes, he knows they’re in Indiana. He doesn’t know how he knows. It’s something a little more than hunter’s intuition. He sticks his hearing aids in before he’s even fully opened his eyes, and when he does, it’s to cornfields speeding by on every side of them. 

“Morning, sunshine,” says Natasha from the driver's seat. They must have switched sometime while he was asleep; Sam is texting on his phone in the backseat. 

Clint stretches best he can in the confined space and rubs his eyes against the blur of yellow and green outside the Delta. “Ah, the Midwest.”

Sam snorts. “You said it.”

“So uh,” Natasha starts, and by the tone of her voice they’re getting back to business, “he’s holed up in the Barnes’s old house, has been for a while now; we’ve got eyes on the place.”

“He’s waiting for us,” Clint says thoughtfully, blinking at the buildings up ahead.

No one says anything. They’re walking into some sort of trap, and they all know it. Clint swallows down the urge to burst in, guns blazing because the demon could slit Bucky’s throat faster than you could say _Be gone, Satan._

So once they’re in town, only fifteen minutes from Bucky’s old house, they get themselves set up in a Motel 6 and as they’re putting together their plan Clint doesn’t think about how this is the closest he’s been to him in five years.

“I need some air,” he says when there’s a lull in the conversation, and leaves the room.

  
  


**2009**

Simple salt and burn. That’s all the case was supposed to be. And it would’ve been, if Clint didn’t catch a headline on his phone that said _“The Ice Pick Killer Strikes Again!”_ right there in the town they were in.

Clint decided to let Natasha and Sam handle the case they’re here for since he feels like he hasn’t gotten any alone time with Bucky in weeks, so while they were gone the two of them ordered a pizza and put on the TV and planned on having a quiet afternoon in.

But of course, of _course_ Clint has to open up his news app during a commercial break, and when he reads that headline he perks up and says, “ _Oooh_ now this sounds interesting.”

Bucky looks over at his phone and wipes grease from his lips. His mouth looks all shiny and inviting and it makes Clint want to kiss him. So he does. Because he can. Bucky goes along with it and then takes Clint’s phone out of his hand so he can scroll through the article himself.

After about a minute, his eyes all squinty and focused, he hands the phone back. “Sounds like a kitsune.”

Clint kisses him again. “You’re so sexy when you talk about the supernatural.”

Bucky shoves an entire garlic knot in his mouth and says something that sounds like, “How about now?”

Clint reaches over and squeezes Bucky’s crotch, making him jump and choke on the bread halfway down his throat. “Oh baby, you have no idea.”

Bucky spits the deformed garlic knot onto the sheets and shoves Clint’s hand off him, laughing. “You’re such a freak, Barton.”

“Only for you, baby,” he puckers his lips and makes kissy noises until Bucky throws the soggy garlic knot at him.

After they’re done laughing (and kissing; they do _so_ much kissing, it’s great), Bucky says, “So are you gonna go, or what?”

Clint looks up from where he’s trying to rub out a grease stain on the sheets with his shirt. “Huh?”

“The kitsune.”

Clint shrugs. “I’ll wait until Sam and Nat get back, it shouldn’t be long.”

The face Bucky makes reminds him of Sam’s Dad Face, and it makes him laugh. “Clint, _six_ people have been killed by this thing; the last one was a mom!”

Clint waggles his finger at him and gets up to throw away their garbage. “Don’t try to guilt trip me like that, babe. We don’t go on hunts alone anymore, you know this. What if I’m mortally wounded?”

Bucky’s quiet. He’s picked up Clint’s phone again and is staring at the screen, forehead all wrinkled and cute. Then he says, “I’ll go with you.”

Clint frowns at him. “What? No you’re not.”

Bucky puts the phone down and gets up from the bed. “Clint, I know how to hunt.” He comes over and clamps one of his strong hands on Clint’s shoulder, then he kisses him again, warm and slow and Clint can feel himself breaking.

“I was raised by a hunter,” Bucky says quietly, “I know the ropes. And honestly, what’s more romantic than killing a monster together?”

He got him there. Clint sighs. “Okay, fine.”

And as they dressed and called a cab, he thought, stupidly: _it’s just_ one _hunt; what’s the worst that could happen?_

  
  


They spend a while asking the local police force about a million and a half questions, posing as college students who are writing a paper on unsolved crimes, but they end up being pretty useless (as most cops are), but after a couple conversations with different homeless folks around town they’re led to an abandoned apartment complex on the outskirts of the town. Fourth floor, to be specific. Third door on the left. Yeah, cops are useless.

“Aren’t abandoned buildings, like, the first place you should look for a killer?” Clint asks as they make their way to the fourth floor up the stairwell. His voice echoes off the cement walls.

Bucky snorts and flips his knife. “Probably.”

Clint tries the knife flip himself, but it doesn’t look half as cool. In fact, Bucky looks like the epitome of _cool_ right now, with his leather jacket that he got from a thrift store last week and his favorite pair of jeans and _God,_ Clint loves those ugly ass boots he always wears when he goes on a hunt. A little thrill runs up Clint’s spine because this is the first time he really gets to see Bucky in action. Sure he’s seen him perform an exorcism, and they spar together sometimes during their downtime, and yeah there was that time last spring when the chimera they were hunting broke into their motel room and Bucky chopped its head off (but that doesn’t really count because Clint was half asleep), but he’s never seen Bucky actually _fight._

They make it up to the fourth floor as quiet as a couple of church mice, and when they come across the third door on the left, Bucky puts his knife in his mouth, clamping his teeth around the blade, and tucks the amulet Clint gave him for their first anniversary into his shirt. He knows they should be in _Hunting Mode_ but he can’t help but smile. He leans over and pecks Bucky on the cheek, making him turn a bright shade of red.

Bucky rolls his eyes, but Clint knows they’re probably gonna have a really sexy night tonight after this.

Okay, _focus._ He shakes the fall chill from his fingers, adjusts the grip on his own knife, and kicks the door open.

The apartment is quiet and empty of any kitsunes, but it smells fucking _awful._ The smell ends up coming from the refrigerator, and when Clint opens it up he’s met with jars and jars of… uh…

He gags, shutting the fridge. “Holy shit, is this what it was like for the cops on the Dahmer case?”

Bucky comes out from the bedroom, hitting his knife against his palm. “Kitsune’s can’t smell humans so we’ll just stay until—”

The door flies open, almost off its hinges. Clint, being the closest, advances first, knife at the ready. He aims for the kitsune’s chest, who’s disguised as one of the old homeless ladies they passed on their way up. Oh, _shit._ Right before the kitsune kicks Clint in the stomach and sends him sprawling across the apartment floor, he sees the blood on its mouth.

“It just fed!” he yells as Bucky takes his turn with it.

Bucky’s exceptionally better with a knife than Clint is, even though the demons he hunts aren’t fazed by knives at _all,_ but still the kitsune takes him by surprise and lands a blow to his jaw. Which shouldn’t hurt considering the fist that hit him is wrinkled and old, but still Bucky’s thrown off his game and it gives the kitsune enough time to unsheath its nasty claws and scratch Bucky’s cheek.

“I just had a big dinner!” the kitsune cackles in its old lady voice and kicks the door shut behind it.

Bucky straightens up, blood welling from the slash across his cheekbone, and backs up until he’s at Clint’s side.

“You okay?” he asks. He thinks he might’ve cracked a rib already.

Bucky grunts his affirmation, not taking his eyes off the kitsune. “My mom always told me you should wait at least thirty minutes after eating before you pick a fight with someone.”

And then he charges, screaming like a banshee, and even though he was looking forward to seeing Bucky in action, he panics at the last second, and right when Bucky’s going in for the kill with his knife he yells, _“Buck!”_ because he’s dumb as fuck and the thing just fed which means it’s stronger than usual.

It distracts Bucky enough that it throws his aim off, and his knife sinks deep between the kitsune’s ribs, just shy of its heart.

_Oh no._

It only takes a second for the kitsune to react, looking down at the hand that’s holding the knife in place and swiping its claws at it. Clint blinks and suddenly there’s more blood than he’s seen come from a human, and it’s coming from _Bucky._ Bucky screams and stumbles back, and he keeps screaming, because the blood is coming from his arm, and—Clint screams too, then—he sees bone and a lot of shit he _shouldn’t_ be seeing. _How fucking sharp are those things?!_

Bucky trails blood through the apartment until his back hits the far wall, and he sinks to the floor, still screaming. His arm hangs like a ragdoll's at his side.

Clint stares down at him, trembling all over. The white of Bucky’s bone is sickeningly bright against the black of his clothes and the longer Clint looks at it the more he wants to vomit.

 _“Clint!”_ Bucky screams through his teeth, and he whips around just in time to see the kitsune lunging for him.

Clint dodges, stumbling over his own feet, and lands hard on his elbow. He cuts an arc through the air with his knife and slashes the kitsune’s knees. Blood seeps through its pants and it howls, raw and animalistic, and kicks the knife out of Clint’s hand. It clatters somewhere behind him. He jumps back to his feet and catches Bucky’s knife when he tosses it up to him.

“I hate hunters,” the kitsune says. Blood stains its shirt where it was stabbed.

“I’ve heard that before.”

He punches it in the nose with one hand and stabs it through the heart with the other.

But it just fed before ambushing them, so it’s stronger than usual, and it doesn’t go down right then like it should. Why is he so fucking stupid? He’s better than this!

Clint lets go of his hold on the knife, staring up at the old woman's face in shock, and it howls again, reaching out with its hands, those shank-like claws a blur.

And then a piercing, mind-splitting pain lights up his whole head, and it’s so excruciating, so shocking, he can’t even scream. His vision swims, and suddenly he’s falling back, falling away, and the grip the dying kitsune has on him is so tight it cuts his face to ribbons as he goes down. He can feel warm blood pouring from his ears and down his neck. The smell is cloying. There’s so _much_ of it.

The last thought he has before passing out completely, staring up at the ceiling of this abandoned apartment in a town he can’t even remember the name of, is _when did Bucky stop screaming?_

  
  


**2014**

A three year relationship, a six year friendship, was over in the span of one hunt gone wrong. They couldn't have been in that apartment for longer than half an hour, and yet it completely flipped their lives upside down.

Clint remembers waking up in the hospital, under the guise that he and Bucky were _urban explorers_ or some shit, attacked by a squatter who just so happened to be the Ice Pick Killer (how lucky is that?). But he couldn’t even enjoy the fact that the town finally got their peace, or how some locals raised enough money to pay off their extensive medical bills when they mentioned offhandedly that they were broke college students (a lie that worked until he turned 30) because they both lost _so much._

Clint woke up with his head wrapped in bandages and the world around him completely silent. The doctors told him via a whiteboard and some markers that his eardrums were ruptured, and there was no hope for his hearing, and _would you like to talk about your options?_ He was in and out of consciousness for almost a week, so he doesn’t remember much. But he does remember the splitting headaches that paralyzed him every second he was awake, and he remembers Natasha’s warm hand on his forehead, trying and failing to give him the relief his morphine drip couldn’t. She still hadn't completely mastered healing yet. He remembers hating her for that.

And then finally he was able to stay awake for more than a couple hours without feeling like death, so of course the first thing he did was ask to see Bucky. So they stuck him in a wheelchair and Natasha wheeled him down the hall.

Bucky wouldn’t talk to him. Sam wouldn’t look at him. It was the worst moment of his life, even worse than being told he’ll never hear again.

He lost his arm, the whole thing up to the shoulder. Because of him. Because—what? Because he didn’t trust him? Because he loved him too much? To this day that whole night at the apartment is kind of a blur, but he knows it was his fault, no matter how many times Natasha told him it wasn’t, and Sam when he could finally look at him again.

Clint lost his hearing, Bucky lost his arm, and the grief they suffered because of it, the trauma they sustained, was just too large to overcome. To make a long, heartbreaking story short, their relationship became irreparable. Where a nightmarish situation brought them together, it was another one that drove them apart, all in the span of a half an hour.

Clint hasn’t thought about any of this in so fucking long.

He takes a drink of his soda, swallowing down with it the urge to bang his head on the table.

The whole time after the hospital was one big fever dream. The four of them moved into the Wilson’s one-storey cottage for the rest of their recovery. Well, Sam and Bucky moved in. Clint and Natasha offered to stay in the garage. The only time they saw Bucky was when they’d head into the house for meals.

This is where Clint started to learn sign language; Mrs. Wilson had a friend who was completely deaf, and offered to teach him. Sam already knew a lot, being schoolmates with the kid of the deaf friend, and after a month they were finally able to have a conversation without the aid of a pencil and paper, or texting.

Clint doesn’t remember when he and Natasha decided to leave, but suddenly one day Sam was handing him the keys to the Delta and they were packing their things into the trunk and saying goodbye. Sam hugged him tight and told him with his hands, _It was not your fault._

And that was it. Then they were gone. And he never got to say goodbye to Bucky.

Natasha slides into the booth next to Clint, startling him once and for all out of his reverie. His eyes are burning.

“How’d you know I was here?”

Her eyes flash purple. “Witchcraft,” She steals a bite of his abandoned burger. “And also if you’re not sleeping you’re eating, and the fridge was empty. Process of elimination, come on, Barton. You must be getting rusty on me.”

“Or maybe this whole thing is just fucked up.”

She picks up the straw wrapper and starts balling it up between her fingers. Clint likes the way her nails sparkle, even if there isn’t any light on them. Natasha just always seems to twinkle a little bit, like his very own light at the end of the tunnel. “We’re going to get him back, you know.”

Clint knows that. Of course he knows that. It’s the only outcome he’ll accept, but it doesn’t take away from the fact that the entire situation is a fucking nightmare and he’s sick of it. Bucky doesn’t deserve this, doesn’t deserve anything he’s been through.

“Yeah.”

He’s being purposely ignorant over the fact that with the lives they lead and the business they’re in, making promises is dangerous.

  
  


Sam is on his feet the second they’re back at the motel room, dressed and ready to go. It makes the hairs on the back of Clint’s neck stand up.

“What’s happening?” Natasha asks, hard and business-like.

“Steve just called,” Sam tells them. His nostrils flair. “Bucky still hasn’t left, and he hasn’t set up any wards or traps or anything.”

“He’s waiting for us to just walk right in,” Clint says, feeling like he’s standing outside of his body. This is it.

Sam nods. “Steve salted the perimeter and devil trapped the hell out of the place, just in case he gets cold feet.”

“If he does, he would just leave Bucky’s body, right?”

Natasha shakes her head. Her eyes are narrowed. “He’s not going to do that. He wants a showdown.”

Right. Well. There’s nothing stopping them now, is there?

Sam claps his hands together. “Alright, team. Let’s get our boy back.”

So they arm themselves to the teeth and hop in the Delta and head for a house Clint’s heard about but never been at. The whole way there Natasha douses them in protection spells, waving her hands, waving burning herbs and crystals, speaks in languages they’ve never heard. At one point she grabs the amulet around Clint’s neck and holds it so tight in her hand her knuckles turn a milky white. When she lets it go, it’s warm.

Steve is waiting in a stolen car across the street when they pull up to the condemned house, and seeing him is like a breath of fresh air.

“Steve, my man,” Sam wraps him up in a tight hug, but Clint can see Steve frowning into his shoulder.

Outside of their immediate (albeit broken) circle, Steve Rogers is probably the closest person to Bucky. He grew up with him and Sam, but decided to do more international work after high school when his dad was killed by a rugaru while his parents were on vacation in South Wales. Clint’s only met him and his hunting partner Peggy a couple of times, but there’s no doubt about how much he cares for Bucky. He’s glad he’s here.

“I flew in as soon as I heard,” Steve tells them when he pulls back.

“We’re glad you’re here,” Natasha tells him, voicing his thoughts. Steve surprises them all by leaning in and kissing her cheek. “Still such a gentleman.”

He takes Clint’s hand next, and stares at him for longer than necessary. His eyebrows are scrunched up, and it looks like he’s been crying.

“Thanks, bro.” Clint clears his throat awkwardly.

Steve decides to watch the perimeter, and pulls a rifle out of his trunk. Natasha does a couple more spells and opens the door to the house. A cloud of dust greets them, and they all have to hold back sneezes.

And there Bucky is. Just waiting for them.

It’s the first time Clint’s seen him in person in five years, and it makes his breath catch in his throat. The shitty news footage didn’t do him any justice; he looks older, handsomer, but Clint knows he’s not really looking at Bucky. Bucky never stood that way, never wrinkled his nose like that.

The crude piece of duct tape that was slapped over his mouth is gone now, replaced with some sort of half mask that covers only his nose and mouth, with unfamiliar sigils drawn on it in white. Clint notices his clothes are bloody and torn, and his body is obviously injured. He just hopes to God the demon hasn’t killed him yet.

“He’s not dead yet,” the demon who’s wearing Bucky’s face says in his voice, “if that’s what you’re thinking.”

As per their plan, Natasha is up first. She does some fancy handiwork, but the demon just laughs, a noise that sounds wrong coming from Bucky, and sends her across the room with a flick of his wrist. She lands against the wall.

Sam’s turn. He holds the gun loaded with devil trap bullets up to Bucky, and the sight makes Clint physically sick. He has to bite his tongue so he doesn’t make the same mistake he did five years ago.

“I’m not afraid to shoot.”

“I know.” The gun is wrenched from Sam’s grip and thumps onto the carpet, just out of Natasha’s reach where she’s still gathering her bearings. And then Sam’s wrist is broken with a sickening snap and he goes down screaming.

They’ve dealt with demons before, and they _planned_ for this, so how could everything be going so wrong so fast?

“You must be Clinton,” the demon says, voice muffled by the mask. “I’ve heard all about you.”

Somehow that’s when Clint realizes—this is the same demon that murdered Bucky’s family, the one he’s been after since he was twenty.

Bucky’s biggest fear was that the demon would get him before he could get _it,_ and now it’s come true.

“You,” is all Clint can say. Out of his periphery he sees Natasha hobbling over to Sam to heal him, but Clint can’t see the telltale purple glow, can’t feel that familiar heat. Her magic’s not working.

The demon chuckles, low and deadly. “You think you’re the only ones who know some fancy warding?”

That’s when Clint notices the symbol on the wall behind him, painted in blood.

“Dunno how your friend outside didn’t see it. Must be dumber than the sorry sack of meat I’m cruisin’ around in. Now—” he pulls off the mask and drops it to the floor. Beneath it is a full beard and a smirking mouth. A mouth Clint has kissed so many times.

Sam, strained, still on the floor with Natasha at his side, starts reciting the incantation, but the demon only struggles a little bit. Sam stops in shock.

The demon holds out Bucky’s arm and says, “Well this is a handy little thing, ain’t it?”

On the inside of Bucky’s wrist, carved with what looks like a knife, is a half circle with a line going through it. _A binding link._ The mask was just for show.

“Clint!” Natasha yells, and when he looks back at her, she throws something small and silver at him. He catches it clumsily. It’s a lighter, one of their old Zippos. The only way to break a binding link is to burn it off.

Clint flicks it open and lunges for the demon. He manages to grab ahold of his wrist, a wrist so familiar yet unfamiliar in his hand, and tries with everything in him to get the flame near the scabbing sigil. But the demon is stronger. Of course he is. Clint’s arms are wrenched behind his back and he drops the lighter. The demon grabs his jaw and pulls him in close.

Clint has looked at this face a million times, at the bump in his nose and the scar above his eye, but he doesn’t recognize it now. It’s terrifying.

“It’s you,” he says again. The demon is holding him so tight his teeth are cutting into the insides of his cheeks.

The demon flashes his black eyes and smiles like the grinch, revealing Bucky’s crooked teeth. “It’s me.”

A gun fires. The bullet lodges itself in Bucky’s shoulder and when he jerks back with the force of it, Clint is able to free himself and pick up the lighter. Blood begins to pour out of Bucky's sleeve and down his arm. Stuck where he stands, Clint grabs the demon's wrist again and disfigures the binding link with the lighter in one quick motion, hating what he’s doing the whole time he’s doing it, hating what they’re all doing to Bucky’s body.

With the binding link gone, Clint starts to recite the incantation again, and even though it’s affecting him like it should now, pulling guttural moans from the depth of his non-existent soul, he somehow manages to dig the bullet out of his arm and throw it across the room. Shocked at both the power he just witnessed and the blood spilling down Bucky’s arm that reminds him so much of that night, Clint stops.

The demon cackles and snaps his fingers, coated in slick red, and just like that Sam and Natasha are rendered unconscious. With another snap, Clint’s mouth is sealed shut as if with glue. Or duct tape. He doesn’t know about Bucky and Sam, but he and Natasha have never encountered a demon this strong. Not even the one back in ‘06.

“What are you gonna do now, huh?” The demon taunts. “You can’t send me back to Hell, and I know you won’t kill this lovely meatsuit I’m sporting.”

Clint is sent to his knees forcefully, and his hands are thrown behind his back again, held in place with invisible handcuffs.

“Now,” says the demon, leaning up against the wall and crossing his arms over his chest. Bucky’s chest. He’s wearing those boots too. “Before I kill you and your friends, and your precious _Bucky,_ of course, let me tell you a little story.”

Clint swallows. He couldn’t give less of a fuck about this asshole’s villainous monologue.

“I know your name, but you don’t know mine. I’m Zack King. Formerly friends with George Barnes.”

_Oh shit._

“Georgie and I were hunting partners, to be more specific. We hunted together right when we both dropped out of high school when we were seventeen. We told each other _everything,_ but there was one thing Georgie kept from me. _He sold his soul._ And us, being young and dumb and high on the fact that we were both away from home for the first time in our lives, thought that was the coolest thing ever. I said to him ‘George, man, what’d you wish for? Money? Booze? Endless whores?’ and he said, ‘I wished for a family.’”

Clint can feel sweat gathering on the back of his neck. This is not where he was expecting this to go, not at all.

“His ma was a hunter, you see. And she never married, had Georgie outta wedlock with some douchebag she saved from a poltergeist and was never happy with any of it. I thought to myself, what a stupid fucking thing to ask for. Hunters can’t have the apple pie life, it’s written in our fuckin’ contracts! And he knew that!

“I forgave him for it, though, you know? ‘Course I did, he was my best friend. And I loved Winnie, and those four brats she popped out. I was _Uncle Z."_

Clint tries to frown.

"But then the hellhounds came. George stayed over my place across town, telling Winnie we were going after a werewolf. I had the entire speech prepared, we worked on it until the clock struck midnight. But then they busted through. He could see them, I couldn’t. He told me they were these big black dogs with teeth as big as your damn fingers. He told me to go in the other room until it was over but I was a coward, and he was my friend, and you know what I did?”

Zack crouches in front of Clint. Clint can smell the blood on him and it makes his nose burn.

“I tried to save him. And they got me too.”

_Well doesn't that sound familiar?_

He stands. Blood drips from his fingertips.

“Getting killed ain’t something you forget easily, you know? I never forgot how my best friend got me killed because he was a selfish sonofabitch with delusions of grandeur. And the folks downstairs love a good vendetta, so after who knows how fuckin' long, I was finally granted the freedom to roam this rock again to get my revenge. Wanna know what that was? Ah, you probably already know, huh? I vowed to kill the very thing I died for—George’s fuckin’ family.”

_But demons can’t remember their past lives…_

“That’s where you’re wrong!” Zack cackles, his eyes wide and crazed. “I sucked up like hell down there, no pun intended. I did everything they asked of me, I tortured souls for a decade straight, Georgie included. My repayment was to keep my memories to carry out my vengeance. Ain’t that grand?

“And I almost succeeded, too; I killed that bitch and her three daughters, dressed up like their sweet neighbor. And then there was James. Handsome young _Bucky_ who didn’t go to college so he could help his ma take care of the girls. Ain’t that just the sweetest thing you ever heard? It makes me _sick._ But what I didn’t know is that the fucker was the only one of the kids who knew their daddy was a hunter. He was his firstborn, after all. George taught him everything he knew. I never knew that. Yet another secret that the bastard kept from me.

“I thought about going after the kid when he ran out, but he already made so much noise I knew I had to get out of there before the cops showed up. So I ditched that sad sack to die a slow death on the Barnes’s living room floor—right over there, actually—and I fled the scene. When I did, I found the fucker with you and Wilson and I almost got him then and there, I really did, but I thought to myself—wouldn’t it just suck for old George to have to watch his only child left suffer all alone on Earth?”

 _Why’d you take so long to kill him then?_ Clint says in his head. He had no fucking clue demons could read minds, but Zack King isn’t just any old black-eyed bitch. _This has got to be the slowest murder in history._

Bucky’s face grows red and angry, and Clint can’t help but smile as much as his frozen mouth will allow. “I waited until he was _happy._ I waited until he had a shiny new family that I could rip away from him. I watched you for years, you know. I watched you fall in love, I watched you argue, I watched you _fuck._ And then I almost had the privilege of watching you both die, but you didn’t. Well, not physically, at least. And then I watched this sweet little family drift apart…”

Swallowing down a bout of nausea that burns his throat, Clint says in his head, _We broke up over five years ago. Why now?_

“For your information, there was some trouble I had to attend to downstairs. But it gave me time to plan my attack, _and I won’t let you ruin it for me.”_

With a quick, powerful shove, Clint is pushed onto his back painfully, his legs bending beneath him at an awkward angle, and Zack frisks him with Bucky’s hand. He finds his switchblade tucked away in his pants pocket and flicks it open. He holds it against Clint’s throat, right beneath his chin, and the metal is cold as ice on his skin. _God, Steve, we could really use your help in here._

“Your hunter friends can’t help you now, Barton,” Zack says, Bucky’s breath rancid in his face. They’re so, so close it’s confusing the shit out of him. “First I’m gonna kill you, then the witch, then your old pal Wilson. Then I’m gonna slit my throat. It’ll be a family reunion. Oh, but before I do, just one more thing—”

He leans in close, Bucky’s long, greasy hair draped over Clint’s face. His hearing aids crackle.

“Bucky’s awake in here.”

A scream works its way up Clint’s throat, and he struggles hard against his invisible binds. The blade is pressed deeper into his throat, nicking his skin. He closes his eyes and waits for the end but—

Zack freezes, his hand going very still on the side of Clint’s jaw. Clint opens his eyes and finds himself staring up at Bucky.

Not Zack King dressed as Bucky, but _Bucky._

And all at once Clint can move. He sits up as Bucky leans back, his hand shaking where he’s gripping the switchblade, muscles standing out on his neck.

“Clint,” says Bucky in that oh-so-familiar voice, strained, his eyes wide and terrified but determined, “I can’t hold him for long.”

Clint starts the latin incantation, not taking his eyes off of Bucky’s face, so pale and bruised and unshaven. He looks like he’s been put through hell and back, which probably isn’t far from the truth. He’s been awake this _whole time?_ Clint’s only a few words in when Bucky starts screaming, and then all at once he stops, and Clint knows Zack’s back in control. He stands up straight, sweat shining on his brow, his chest heaving. And then he stabs Bucky in the side, not even flinching as he does it. Clint scrambles to his feet.

 _“Bastard,”_ he spits, and Clint isn’t sure if he’s talking to him or to Bucky. He has the blade held to Clint’s throat again in the blink of an eye, Bucky's blood staining his skin, but Bucky takes the wheel again. Clint can tell in the pace of his breath, the look in his eyes. He’d know those eyes anywhere.

“Get the gun,” he tells him now, sounding more pained than before. He’s hunched over slightly, and Clint can see the wet shine to his black shirt, “and shoot me in the fucking head.”

Clint’s stomach drops, and he puts his hands on the sides of Bucky’s face because _he has to._ “I can’t do that.”

Bucky makes a frustrated noise, tears springing to his eyes, and shoves past Clint to where the gun lays forgotten on the carpet. He drops to his knees clumsily, like he’s sleepwalking, like he has no strength left in him, and picks it up. Clint watches in horror as he holds it to his temple.

And then his back is straightening, his breathing is evening out, and he says, “Oh no, pal. You’re not getting outta this that easily. You’re gonna know what it feels like to kill your friends, and then you can join them. And I’ll be waiting for you when you get to Hell.”

The gun is turned on him, and Clint steps back. His foot hits something. He looks down and finds one of their flasks of holy water, dropped when Natasha and Sam were knocked out. He’s sent to his knees again just as he’s wondering how he’s going to pick it up without Zack knowing.

The gun is leveled at his head, Bucky’s finger on the trigger. His hands aren’t pulled behind his back again though, and his mouth isn’t sealed shut, so Clint does what he’s best at. He talks.

“I was just like you once,” he tells Zack hurriedly, and relishes in the confused tilt of his head. “I thought hunters couldn’t live the _apple pie life_ either. Until I met Bucky, and Sam, and Natasha. Then I realized you don’t _need_ a white picket fence if you’ve got some people around you that you love, and who love you back. And yeah, letting yourself become close to people in this business is dangerous, but isn’t that a risk we should be willing to take? This life is nothing if you don’t let yourself love. It’s a lonely fucking life.”

Cords stand out on Bucky’s neck. His arm shakes.

“George Barnes had more balls than you; he died for love. You killed his family because you didn’t get that. You were jealous. He put in the work but you didn’t. Do you know how much fucking work I put into loving Bucky? Loving _them?”_ He thumbs behind him at Sam and Natasha’s still bodies. “Do you know how many times I thought about packing up and leaving because I was terrified of them getting hurt? Or me? Do you know how terrified George Barnes must’ve been, every waking hour, for ten years straight? _But we all stuck through._ For love. You’re just a coward, ruining some man’s life—who was your best friend, by the way—just because he got what you thought was impossible.”

“I died for him!” Zack shouts, crazed, sounding like he’s losing control. _Good._

“Looks like you died for the same thing George did.”

Clint grabs the flask of holy water and splashes it in his face. The demon screams and drops the gun. The smoke and smell of burning flesh is sickening but familiar, and Clint watches as he stumbles around the living room until suddenly he stops, right at the base of the staircase. And Clint knows, if he were to pull up the carpet, he’d find a devil’s trap there.

He takes advantage and begins the incantation again, clumsy and unfamiliar on his tongue, but the results don’t waver. Zack’s screaming grows louder, his skin growing flushed, every muscle in Bucky’s abused body taut and standing out beneath his shredded clothes. By the end of the incantation he has to yell to be heard, and right when the last word of Latin leaves his lips Bucky’s head is thrown back and a pulsing stream of black smoke makes its way up his throat and out his mouth. Right when the smoke hits the ceiling and disperses, the screaming stops and Bucky’s body drops. Clint is right there to catch him.

Clint collapses onto the bottom step and pulls Bucky’s limp body into his lap. His skin is a sickly pale, but he’s warm to the touch, and blood starts to pour from his nose as the Band-Aid that was Zack King is ripped off. The effects of the extensive injuries he suffered over the last week or so are finally catching up with his body and it’s terrifying to see. That son of a bitch could’ve done anything to him; his insides could look like roadkill for all they know.

The door slams open and Clint looks up to see Steve Rogers barging in with his rifle at the ready. Natasha is awake and helping a drowsy Sam to his feet. They all turn to look at them.

Bucky moves. Clint looks down and sees his eyes rolling beneath their shiny lids. He wipes away the blood from his nose that’s spilled over his lips.

“Buck?”

Bucky moans, low in his throat. Clint swallows and holds him as tight as he dares. His eyes open. They’re unfocused and bloodshot. “Long time no see,” he whispers.

Clint laughs and _fuck,_ isn’t this some shitty déjà vu. “Yeah, you look awful.”

HIs eyes flutter shut again but he licks his lips. “Had a rough coupla days. Thanks. Again.”

Clint can’t help it—he starts to cry. Sam, Natasha, and Steve are inching their way over to them. There’s a quip on the tip of his tongue, but he can’t. He can’t. “What’d I tell you all those years ago?”

Bucky’s mouth does something that might be a smile, might be a grimace. “Together.”

Clint’s heart stutters in his chest. “Yeah. Together.”

  
  
  


**Epilogue**

Clint wakes up in a hammock. Well, not really a hammock, but the air mattress Mrs. Wilson dragged down from the attic is so old that it started deflating in the middle of the night and Clint isn’t one to wake up once he’s asleep, so. He rolls off the bed and onto the hardwood floor. Sam’s still asleep on his couch, face smooshed into his pillow and his arm hanging over the edge, but Natasha’s gone. He pops in his hearing aids where they were in their fancy little case on the floor and stands up.

“Morning, Clint!” Natasha calls from the kitchen like she can read his mind.

(She totally can.)

He pads barefoot into the kitchen, where she and Mrs. Wilson are sitting at the table drinking coffee. They look up at him and smile.

“Hey,” he says, scratching at his chest idly. This is a good sight to walk in on.

“How are you feeling, baby?” Mrs. Wilson asks. “There’s coffee left in the pot.”

He makes a beeline for the coffee maker and pours himself a cup. “I’d be feeling a lot worse if Nat wasn’t here,” he says truthfully.

“The only reason he keeps me around is for my magic,” Natasha tells Mrs. Wilson in a stage whisper, putting her hand up to cover her mouth.

 _“Nooo,_ I keep you around for your bag too! I don’t know what I’d do without that thing.”

When he wanders back over to the table Natasha reaches out and punches him in the thigh. Her rings will probably leave a bruise, but Clint laughs and tugs on her hair in return, tied back in a braid today. He catches Mrs. Wilson’s eye and blushes; she’s watching them all “moony-eyed,” as Bucky would call it.

“I missed seeing you all together,” she says, sounding wistful. Clint knows the feeling. “I just wish it didn’t take something like this for it to happen.”

And boy doesn't he know _that_ feeling too.

“We missed you too, Darlene,” Natasha says, reaching across the table to take her hand. “I’m sorry we couldn’t get over our huge egos.”

That’s not all of it, and Clint knows they both know that, but it seems pointless to say it.

Mrs. Wilson shakes her head and pats Natasha’s hand before pulling away and picking up her mug of coffee again. “If one of y’all apologizes one more time we’re gonna kick you out.”

Clint hides his smile by taking another sip of his own coffee.

Sam joins them then, dragging his feet into the kitchen half asleep. He leans over and kisses his mom on the cheek.

“Hi, baby, how’d you sleep?”

“Like we got our asses whooped yesterday. Morning, y’all.”

Clint and Natasha wish him a good morning, and Clint hands him his half-drunk coffee. Sam takes it gratefully, not evening caring that Clint had his mouth all over the mug.

“Sam, would you go check on James, please?” Mrs. Wilson asks, tugging on the hem of his shirt. Clint, who was just about to pour himself more coffee, puts his hand up. “I’ll go.”

He turns and starts down the hall before they can all _moon_ at him.

The door to Sam’s old room is propped open just a little, and Clint uses his foot to push it open enough for him to slip through. Bucky is buried beneath the mountains of blankets Mrs. Wilson lent him the night before, the only visible part of him being his unfamiliarly long hair spread out on his pillow. Clint puts his hand on Bucky’s hip, a gesture he’s done so many times before, but rethinks and pulls away.

“Buck?”

Bucky stirs, being the light sleeper he always was, and pushes the blankets back to reveal his face. He’s still pale as death, and the bags under his eyes look like fresh bruises. Despite Natasha’s insistence, and Mr. and Mrs. Wilson’s since they’ve been hunting longer than all of them combined, Bucky refused to take any sort of potion or elixir after his initial injuries were all healed up and he was no longer in danger of dropping dead. There's only so much Natasha's magic can do, hence why he's still deaf, but Sam told him back after the accident that he didn’t even like to take his prescription painkillers. Clint couldn’t even imagine; he asks Natasha for some relief when he gets a _papercut._

“Hey, there he is,” he says softly. “How are you doing?”

Bucky pushes himself up and rubs his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. The missing arm is still jarring to see, and not for the first time Clint wishes he could’ve been there for him while he recovered. Going deaf is far from losing a whole limb.

“Next question. What about you?”

Bucky kicks the blankets to the foot of the bed and Clint can see the cord of his amulet peeking out from the neckline of his sleep shirt. He took it back when they said goodnight, and apparently he slept with it on.

“About the same.”

Bucky looks up at him with those blue-gray eyes he fell in love with all those years ago, surrounded now by wrinkles that Clint wasn’t around to witness. He wasn’t around to see what gave him those laughter lines either. They just stare at each other for a while, and without thinking, Clint reaches out and cradles Bucky’s jaw, brushing his thumb through the coarse hair of his beard. By his chin is a little patch of gray that stands out.

It’s been so long. _Too_ long.

Clint sighs. “I’m sorry.”

Bucky wilts into his palm a little, a valley forming between his eyebrows, and grasps at his wrist. He closes his eyes. “Me too.”

There’s so much more to say, but it’s a start.

“I think…” Bucky squeezes his wrist a little harder until Clint can feel his own pulse, “I want to get a tattoo.”

Well that definitely wasn’t what he was expecting, but Clint goes along with it. Even after all this time, he’d still take a swan dive off the Golden Gate Bridge if Bucky asked him.

“Okay.”

  
  


“You know you’re gonna need a hell of a lot more than a tattoo to protect you, right?”

Bucky adjusts his hat that he wrangled his hair into and frowns at Sam. He’s also donning a pair of Mr. Wilson’s sunglasses, and he shaved completely. He almost looks five years younger. “It’s a good place to start, though.”

He knocks out two shaves and a haircut onto the door and a second later Carol Danvers is beaming at them like the sun. She’s in a dirty old shirt stained with ink, and there’s even some in her blonde hair. “Holy shit,” she says and pulls them all in and shuts the door behind them. “Barnes, you’re like a fucking cat!”

Bucky takes his hat and glasses off and gives her a brief hug. He still looks like death, but at least he’s smiling. “To quote a certain murderous doll, you just can’t keep a good guy down.”

Maria’s in the parlor, spread out on the chair, and when she hears that she cackles and pumps a fist. “Good to see y’all together again! Barnes and Barton breaking up was the bang heard ‘round the hunting community.”

Clint’s face prickles, and when he looks to Bucky he finds him staring down at his feet.

“Hey, I’ll be with you guys in a sec,” Carol tells them, heading back over to Maria. “Make yourselves at home, you know the deal.”

Carol and Maria have always been those hunters that open their doors to whoever might need it; they’ve all crashed in their spare rooms at some point or another, and Clint is glad they’re here now, even if it’s just to get a couple of tattoos.

They all file into the sitting room and sit down, Sam and Natasha on one couch, Bucky and Clint on the other, and that sense of déjà vu washes over him again that makes him think it’s five years earlier. It finally could be, now that Bucky’s finally safe and whole and _alive,_ but Clint doesn’t want to live in the past anymore, he can’t. This business doesn’t let you. It’s not five years earlier, it’s now. They’re all older, wiser, a little more rough around the edges. This is the second chance, the one Clint always dreamed about, so it just doesn't seem right to be looking over his shoulder still.

They can’t just fall back into their old routines and pretend like everything is how it used to be, but Clint can’t stop himself from laying his hand out palm up on Bucky’s knee, an open invitation just like how Bucky used to do to him. Bucky looks at his hand, goes through the seven stages of grief in the span of a second, and finally takes it. The contact makes Clint’s stomach do a somersault. The last time they held hands—not counting yesterday when Natasha was healing him on the floor of his old house—was when they were on their way to that abandoned apartment building. Bucky must be thinking the same thing because he smiles at Clint, small and shy.

Clint lets out a sigh that came from his toes. Things might be different now, but at least they’re all together again. That’s the only thing that matters.

“Next clients, please!”

The four of them look towards the parlor and get up. Bucky drops Clint’s hand, but it’s okay. Maria is standing in front of the full length mirror on the wall by the windows admiring herself, and Carol is cleaning up her station.

“Pop a squat, whoever’s next,” she pats the vinyl seat without looking up.

Bucky doesn’t even hesitate before he’s stepping forward and sitting down. It makes Clint’s heart squeeze in his chest.

No doubt sensing the anxiety in the room, Natasha asks Maria, “So what’d you get, Rambeau? Thought you didn’t like tattoos.”

Carol, still setting herself up, gives a little whoop. “After fifteen years I _finally_ broke her.”

Maria shakes her head and turns to face the room with her sleeve rolled up. On her bicep is their daughters full name and the day she was born. Clint remembers that day like it was yesterday, not because you can’t exactly forget the day a baby is born very easily, but because that was the first time he told Bucky he loved him.

They were all packed into Maria’s hospital room, taking turns holding baby Monica while about a dozen other hunters were making the staff nervous out in the waiting room. Bucky was rocking her in his arms, all misty-eyed and soft around the edges, looking like the big brother he was, and it just slipped out.

“That’s cute as hell, Maria,” Sam says when they were quiet for a beat too long.

They all agree, then the sound of a tattoo gun shatters the moment. Bucky’s sitting back in the vinyl seat with his shirt off and his amulet slung over his right shoulder. On his left, right over the gnarly scarring that makes up most of his pec (that Clint never got a chance to see before now) is a purple devil’s trap transfer. Clint has thought about what Bucky’s arm might look like now, but finally seeing it up close, it’s almost enough to make him want to turn and leave the room. But he doesn’t. He keeps looking, and almost wishes he still had those gashes on his face still for Bucky to see. Because if he took his hearing aids out, or even if he simply brushed his hair over his ears, no one would be able to tell there was something wrong with him, and that doesn’t seem fair.

“So many hunters have come in here asking for anti-possession tattoos I could probably do it in my sleep,” Carol tells them, leaning in to start tracing the purple stamp with her gun.

Maria, having covered up her fresh tattoo with tape and cling wrap, asks them, “Would y’all like anything to drink? Iced tea?”

 _“God,_ yes,” says Natasha emphatically, and follows her into the kitchen. “Your iced tea is like crack.”

“My secret ingredient is this fresh honey that…”

“So,” Carol says when it’s been quiet for long enough. She was never one for quiet work environments. “You guys all okay now?”

Bucky scratches at the back of his neck. “Physically, yeah, thanks to Natasha. Every other way? Jury’s still out. But this ain’t anything new. We’ll be fine.”

Clint watches Carol wipe excess ink and blood off Bucky’s chest with her rag, his fingers digging into his thighs from where his hands are shoved into his pockets.

“Y’all have been through some shit, but you always make it out in one piece,” her hands still for a fraction of a second. “Well, you make it out _alive._ You know, Mon had a question on her homework the other day that said _who is a real life superhero?_ and you know what she said? _Nat, Clint, Sam, and Bucky.”_

Sam bursts out laughing at that and has to sit down. Clint smiles and catches Bucky’s eye, and he smiles too.

“Superheroes! Kids say the damndest things, huh?”

“You’re telling me,” Carol laughs. “It’s because she always eaves drops when we’ve got someone in the chair, and you guys know how hunters love to gossip. If she was home right now she’d be spying on us from the stairs.”

Boy, does Clint know hunters love gossip. He couldn’t set foot in a bar or any other hunter-dominated establishment for months after the accident without hearing his or Bucky’s name.

“That’s cute,” Bucky says, no doubt thinking the same thing. “You’ll tell her we said hi?”

“Yeah! She’ll be PO’d she missed you guys.”

Natasha and Maria come back into the parlor carrying a pitcher of fresh iced tea and some glasses. Carol finishes with Bucky’s tattoo then, squeezing some gel onto it and wiping it off.

“Voilà!” She pushes herself back on her stool and accepts a glass of tea from her wife.

Bucky looks down at the tattoo with a furrow in his brows and tears in his eyes. “Thanks, Carol,” he says, clearing his throat a couple of times. Clint is glad for the glass Maria hands him.

Carol kisses Bucky on the cheek and drops his shirt into his lap. “It’s what I’m here for, baby. Alright, next!”

Clint goes next, then Natasha, and finally Sam, who was too busy gushing over pictures of Monica on Maria’s phone. When they’re all inked up courtesy of Carol, and patched up courtesy of Maria, Carol tells them all, “Keep your wallets in your pockets, ‘kay? First tattoos are always on me.”

Natasha lifts up the hem of her shirt, showing off the witchy symbol she got for her birthday a couple years ago, and Sam points out his parents initials on the inside of his wrists that Clint didn’t notice until then.

Carol just waves them off. “You’re still kicking, that’s payment enough.”

“Actually,” Maria says, “there is something you can give us.”

“Anything,” Bucky says immediately. The three of them nod in agreement.

“Go see Nick, huh?”

 _Nick._ God, Clint hasn’t talked to him in years.

“Fury?” Bucky asks, pulling his hat back on. He does it with a finesse that tells Clint he’s had plenty of practice with his one arm. “Last I heard, he was retired, right?”

“Yeah, he turned his cabin into a sort of headquarters,” Carol tells them, moving to stand next to Maria. “Need to make a bullshit call to your _‘supervisors?’_ He’s your man. Need some info you can’t find online or at the library? He’s probably got it. He’s saved my ass more than once.”

“And since he’s stepped back from hunting, he’s gained a lot of connections. You know—he helps people disappear if they need to.”

_Oh._

That worry line reappears between Bucky’s eyes. “Disappear?”

Sam’s face lights up with dawning realization. “Like when the cops were after Rhodey when that shifter stole his face, right?” Bucky flinches at that. “I always wondered how he managed to get them off his tail. That was Fury?”

Carol nods. “Sent him packing to New Zealand.”

Then Maria’s asking, all soft and motherly, “Rogers's still living in the UK with Carter?” and Clint’s stomach drops out through the floor.

There’s a visible shift in energy in the room, and when Bucky speaks, he sounds much younger than he actually is. “Yeah. You think I gotta go?”

“I don’t think you’ve got much of a choice, babe,” Carol tells him, reaching out to squeeze his shoulder. “That asshole demon did some damage.”

Clint’s throat feels like it’s closing up, and he takes a hurried sip of his iced tea. He just got Bucky and Sam _back._ He won't survive losing them again.

And then Bucky does something Clint wasn’t expecting. He walks over and takes Clint’s hand. It’s clammy and shaking, but Clint knows that his own probably feels the same. Bucky’s looking at him with a fierceness in his eyes he hasn’t seen in years. Everyone else seems to melt away, and it’s just the two of them standing in the parlor. Clint swallows.

Bucky smiles, slow and as shaky as his hand is, and Clint understands.

He’s thought about what a second chance might look like, but it never went like this. Somehow this is better. Fuck a white picket fence.

Bucky lets go of Clint’s hand and says in sign language, taking him by surprise, _Together?_

Clint repeats the sign. _Together._

**Author's Note:**

> i’m always open to constructive criticism so don’t be shy!!! leave comments here or hit me up on [twitter](https://mobile.twitter.com/shuntheiight)! or if being Known isn’t your thing then leave me an anon on [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.qa/steviebarnes)!!!!
> 
> see you next time! ❤️


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